Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many and what proportion of benefits claims were found to be fraudulent in each of the last two years.

Estimates of fraud and error levels in the benefit system, including for the last two financial years, have been published and can be found at:

Fraud and error in the benefit system - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The rate of fraud overpayments fell from 3.0% of benefit expenditure in 2021/2022 to 2.7% in 2022/23.

To be clear, the percentage of fraud cases represents the average cases incorrect due to fraud at one time, rather than the total number over a whole year. We express this as a percentage, rather than as a whole number.