Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Education and Skills Funding Agency Annual report and accounts 2023–24, published on 29 July 2024 (HC13), what estimate they have made of the overall fraud and error rate, including undetected losses, across the £72 billion of distributed funding; whether they hold disaggregated estimates of fraud and error by programme areas; and if so, whether they will publish those estimates.

The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) has not completed a formal estimate of fraud and error rates across its distributed funding.

In 2025, the ESFA delivered year 2 of its Counter Fraud Strategy. Part of this strategy is built on the ‘Prevent’ and ‘Protect’ duties.

With regards to the Prevent duty, the ESFA focuses on fraud prevention through its use of data analytics and collaboration with other government departments to identify and tackle risks and issues early. We continue to identify risk through a programme of fraud risk assessments, with a fraud and error reduction plan to mitigate individual and strategic risks.

With regards to the Protect duty, sector working groups have been developed which enable the sharing of alerts and risks. The publication of the ESFA investigation outcome reports also enhances the sharing of lessons learnt across the sector. In addition, the ESFA successfully benchmarked against the Government Counter Fraud Functional Standards to assess counter fraud maturity.

The ESFA annually publishes its common findings from funding assurance work in relation to education providers. The purpose of this is to raise awareness of common compliance issues and to ultimately reduce error. The full guidance can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/esfa-assurance-work-on-post-16-funding/common-findings-from-funding-assurance-work-on-post-16-education-providers.

The ESFA Counter Fraud and Funding Assurance functions were moved into the department as of 1 April 2025 following the ESFA’s closure.