Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people have been convicted for benefit fraud in (a) Romford, (b) the London Borough of Havering and (c) the UK in each of the last five years.

DWP does not hold the requested information broken down to local geographical level.

Across England, Scotland and Wales, the number of convictions for benefit fraud over the last 5 full financial years is as follows*:

• 2017/18 – 4,800
• 2018/19 – 2,700
• 2019/20 – 1,900
• 2020/21 – 500
• 2021/22 – 600

*Figures – which are rounded to the nearest 100 – are based on internal management information and therefore have not been subject to the same degree of scrutiny and quality assurance as an official statistic

In 2017, the department increased the prosecution threshold from £2000 to £5,000.

However, any case over £3000 is routed to DWP Investigations team.

This meant most could generate better returns for the taxpayer by allowing trained investigators to focus on serious fraud. However, we reserve the right to refer any case for prosecution. Compliance Officers continue to conduct robust and challenging interviews in all other scenarios and all debt is recoverable.

In addition, the department diverted resources to tackle Advances Fraud in 2019, which is demonstrated by a corresponding increase in Administrative Penalties.

Figures for the last 2 years reflect the re-deployment of staff to help meet the unprecedented demand for financial support during Covid and the social distancing measures put in place, which constrained our ability to carry out face to face Interviews Under Caution.

We continue to recruit Investigators and now have Covid compliant interview facilities in place, which means we expect to see a significant upturn in prosecution numbers over the next 2 years.