Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the value is of duplicate supplier payments identified by his Department since 2010; and what proportion of such payments have since been recovered in each of the last two financial years.

The Department checks for duplicate supplier payments as part of the business as usual processes within the finance team. As part of the internal process checks the Department has identified the value of duplicate supplier payments since 2010 as £1,287,260.31.

The proportion of such payments the Department has recovered following these internal checks in each of the last two financial years is as follows:

(i) Payments for 1 April 2012 to 31 March 2013 - £325,456.94 - of which 100% has been recovered based on the internal processes.

(ii) Payments for 1 April 2013 to 31 March 2014 – £282,198.56 - of which 100% has been recovered based on the internal processes.

For completeness, in the financial year 2010-11 the value of such payments was £510,599.10 of which 99.7% was recovered, and in financial year 2011-12 the value of such payments was £169,005.71 of which 98.6% was recovered.

Further investigations are taking place into duplicate payments made as part of a Spend Recovery Audit that the Department has commissioned externally and we will seek to recover any further duplicates identified as part of this exercise.