Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many staff have been assigned to the dedicated team investigating universal credit advance payment loan fraud.

We have 145 staff in the dedicated team. We also have a number of investigators who, as part of their caseload, will be investigating Universal Credit advances fraud cases, but are not part of the dedicated team.

In addition to investigating cases, we are proactively addressing this issue with messaging on social media to raise awareness and remind people of the importance of safeguarding their identity, and by continuing to work with Social Media sites to shut down posts which promote this fraud. We have shut down 164 sites so far.