Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the report entitled Cross-Government Fraud Landscape: Annual Report 2022, published on 21 March 2023, what the basis is of the increase in detected error in her Department from £7.5m in 2019-20 to £29.1m in 2020-21.

The increase in detected error was driven by the department migrating some of its financial services from an external provider to a pre-existing in-house service.

All detected errors were corrected within the financial quarter in which they occurred. No losses were incurred.

Where errors occur, the department operates a robust process to ensure lessons are learned and corrective actions embedded into processes and ways of working. This is reflected in the drop back to zero detected errors in quarter 3 and quarter 4 of the year.