Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to help prosecute people accused of fraud involving the universal credit advance payment loan.

The Department continues to work hard to ensure that the perpetrators of Universal Credit advances fraud are punished.

We have worked with the Crown Prosecution Service to ensure that there will be no specific overpayment value threshold for prosecution to be considered in Universal Credit advances fraud cases. This will allow decisions to be made purely on the strength of evidence.

We continue to work with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service to ensure that a similar approach is applied for cases in Scotland.