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 ensure compliance with benefit eligibility rules by foreign nationals.

The Department applies strict compliance and benefit eligibility checks to all claimants regardless of their nationality. In addition to verifying a claimant’s identity, DWP checks that claimants are habitually resident here before they can receive public funds benefits including Universal Credit. DWP also applies strict past presence requirements to ensure that claimants of disability and carer benefits have a substantial and recent connection to this country before they can claim. In addition, DWP always checks a person’s immigration status before paying them benefits if they are a foreign national. We verify this information with the Home Office, including through automatic system-to-system checks.

This Government takes all cases of fraud seriously and has introduced the biggest package of measures in recent history to reduce welfare fraud, error and debt, which includes new legislation, the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill. This contains new powers to modernise our defences and is currently progressing through Parliament.