Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate she has made of the cost to her Department of fraudulent universal credit claims since the roll-out of universal credit.

The Department is open and transparent about the cost of fraud and error in the benefit system, publishing our National “Fraud and Error in the Benefit System” statistics each year which detail the amount we estimate is lost to both fraud and error across all benefits.

The latest publication to Gov.uk was made on 9 May 2019 and contains estimates of fraud and error in Universal Credit. The publication can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/fraud-and-error-in-the-benefit-system-financial-year-2018-to-2019-estimates

As UC expenditure increases, we would also expect to see an increase in the value of fraud and error. We also expect a further increase as UC involves significantly expanding the Department’s caseload and expenditure to include Tax Credits, which were previously administered by Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs.

The design of UC is expected to lead to a reduction in overpayments across welfare. UC allows us to adjust benefit entitlement in line with changing circumstances in real time. Internal and external data matches are increasingly helping to inform benefit payments and alerting staff to check for any undeclared changes in people’s circumstances.