Department For Work And Pensions (Image: Getty)
Benefit fraudsters are escaping justice because there are too many of them to prosecute.
The Department for Work and Pensions is only prosecuting “big, organised” fraud cases because of a massive backlog in the courts, officials admitted.
It follows a massive jump in the amount of taxpayers’ money lost to fraudsters, up from £2.1 billion in 2019 to £7.4 billion in 2024.
Another £1.6 billion is wrongly paid because of what are believed to be genuine mistakes by claimants.
The increase is a result of the decision to stop checking claims during the pandemic, in an attempt to get cash to those who needed it urgently. This opened the door to criminals exploiting the system, officials admitted.
They said they were confident of stamping out fraud and getting the problem down to pre- levels – but not until 2030.
Neil Couling, Director General for Fraud, Disability and Health at the Department for Work and Pensions, said: “Fraud is such a big volume that you can’t prosecute your way out of this problem. So we are reserving our prosecutions for the most egregious, the big, organised cases.
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“For individualised frauds, there is a series of administrative penalties we would apply rather than go to the courts, because the courts themselves are very busy with their own backlogs of prosecutions that the are trying to work through.”
Official figures show there is a backlog of 73,000 cases of all types waiting to be heard in crown courts.
The Department’s Permanent Secretary Sir Pete Schofield told a House of Commons inquiry that fraud and error “rose significantly” during the pandemic when the department received 2.4 million new claims for Universal Credit within three months.
He said: “There were some days where we had 100,000 people claiming in one day and we took a decision that it was a priority for the department to pay people and get people into payment which we were very successful at doing, but the result of that was that we saw fraud and error come into the system.”
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Anti-fraud measures announced by the Government including recruiting 3,000 enforcement staff are expected to save £2.5 billion by the 2029-30 financial year.
The officials clashed with MPs when they claimed they were fighting an uphill battle because the public has become more dishonest.
Sir Peter highlighted figures showing 12% of people in the UK admitted to committing fraudulent conduct against a business or public body in 2023, up from 8% in 2021. He warned of “the propensity in society in general for fraud and fraud tolerance” and told MPs: “We are fighting against these headwinds.”
Mr Couling insisted: “This looks like a societal challenge.”
Debbie Abrahams, chair of the Commons Work and Pensions Committee, said: “We need to be very, very careful before we make statements about ‘this is a societal trend’. It’s a very serious accusation to put on the public that we are becoming increasingly fraudulent.”
MPs will debate planned new laws on Monday to strip benefit cheats of driving licences for two years. The Government’s new Public Authorities (Fraud, Error & Recovery) Bill will also hand the Department for Work and Pensions’ serious organised crime investigators powers to apply to a court for search warrants, allowing them to enter homes alongside police and seize items such as computers and smartphones to be used in evidence against fraudsters.