Benefits fraudsters can steal thousands of pounds a year (Image: Getty)
DWP benefits fraudsters are stealing up to £10,000 a year with growing numbers cheating the system, an MP has warned after visiting his local job centre.
Damien Egan, MP for Bristol North East, spoke to work coaches at the job centre in his area who have worked there for over 40 years, and was told “they’ve never seen it so bad” in terms of fraudulent claims.
Speaking to the Work and Pensions Committee on which he sits, Mr Egan shared details of one worrying trend: “I was surprised to hear that people were getting money for health benefits even when it might just say ‘no can work’.
“Then it would take months and months and months before work capability kicked in, and then there was a repeat pattern when these people were found fit for work, and then would come back into the system with something else. It wasn’t being checked.”
Universal Credit claimants often have to undergo a work capability assessment to find out to what extent they can work and what requirements there should be for them to look for a job or to increase their hours.
One of the work coaches told the MP that people can also abuse the self-employed expenses scheme, as you can boost your benefits by £10,000 a year using “various expenses”.
Mr Egan warned: “The system isn’t checking it. It’s just too easy.” He went on to say that the work coaches have found efforts to tackle fraud have dipped despite the growing problem.
The MP said: “They were saying that as fraud has been going up, the amount of investigations and prosecutions has been going down. So it’s created this perfect storm. Criminal gangs are exploiting the system.”
He was speaking on the committee during a meeting with officials from the , to discuss its efforts to tackle fraud as new legislation is coming in allowing officials to check details of bank statements and take money directly from people’s bank accounts, in cases of fraud.
representatives said they are stepping up their efforts to tackle fraud, including working with the Home Office using their border records to show when claimants are going in and out of the UK in breach of their benefit rules.
They also said that efforts to make tax digital through will help with the self-employed expenses issue, as the will have access to more of that data.
Mr Egan also asked if there have been increased prosecutions of fraudsters. In response, Neil Couling, director general of Fraud, Disability and Health and senior responsible owner of Universal Credit, said: “Fraud is such a big volume that you can’t prosecute your way out this problem.
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“We are reserving our prosecutions for the most egregious, the big organised cases. So for individualised frauds, there’s a series of administrative penalties that we would apply, rather than go to the courts.
“The courts themselves are very busy with their own backlogs of prosecutions that they are trying to work through.”
There was a spike in benefit fraud during the pandemic, when there was a huge rise in claims. During this period, there were 2.4 million new claims, with 100,000 claims in a single day at times. The hopes to recover £1.7billion this year in savings from fraud and error.
New powers in the F raud, Error and Recovery bill will allow investigators to request bank statements in cases of fraud, to verify that a person has the money to pay up, and officials will be allowed to deduct funds from a person’s account.
Critics of the new measures fear and that taking money from a person’s bank account could put people in financial hardship.
But Mr Couling said these powers will only be used as a last resort: “We give the opportunity for people to pay this money back. We don’t go straight to these powers. These are conversations.”
He added: “The whole process and the point of the powers is designed to encourage people to pay what they owe. It’s not that we say you’re a fraudster, we’re going straight to your bank account, it just doesn’t work in that way.”