Sunak under fire for Covid fraud billions

SEnIOR Tories have hammered Rishi Sunak for allowing billions of pounds to be lost in fraud and error from Covid schemes.

The ex-chancellor has been forced to defend his pandemic record just as he attempts to portray himself as the careful steward of the public’s finances.

His critics are determined to make his handling of the crisis a key issue as Conservative members prepare to vote on whether they want Mr Sunak or Liz Truss to replace Boris Johnson.

This week Mr Sunak said it was ‘reasonable’ for taxes to rise ‘because everyone knows we’ve spent a fortune during Covid’.

But leading Tories labelled his ‘spray and pay’ approach to coronavirus handouts as ‘shamefully negligent’, and accused Mr Sunak of ‘talking a good game, which is not matched by delivery’.

As much as a tenth of the £376billion Covid bill was squandered by the Treasury to fraud, waste or loss – potentially costing each Briton £559. This included loans worth up to £17billion granted under the bounce back loan scheme which will never be repaid. Of this £3.5billion was lost to organised criminals, fraudsters and error, according to the latest estimates.

Another £4billion was expected to be lost to fraudsters from the furlough scheme and the Eat Out To Help Out restaurant subsidy. The losses have led critics to question Mr Sunak’s record at the Treasury. Lord Agnew, who resigned over its failure to tackle fraud, told the Daily Mail: ‘Rishi Sunak has set out his stall as a careful steward of the nation’s finances but key questions remain unanswered about how the Government is tackling the appalling levels of fraud in the Covid schemes.

‘Mr Sunak has repeatedly blocked the publication of the performance dashboard which could save the taxpayer hundreds of millions, if not billions, of pounds. He talks a good game, but on the ground the delivery doesn’t match it. It is a cruel irony that at a time when we should be diverting resources to assist in the cost of living crisis, taxpayers’ money is being wasted on this scale.’

Another senior Tory said: ‘It is shamefully negligent that no basic safeguards were put in place when these loans were made. Billions were carelessly shovelled out of the door... Efforts at retrieving the money have been lacklustre to say the least. And now we’re paying the highest taxes since the 1940s to fund all this. It’s just staggering.’

A third Tory said: ‘Clearly Rishi Sunak adopted a spray and pay policy and we could all see on the ground that there was something amiss. To a degree you can understand why in a national emergency you just want to get money out the door. But it is still true that billions of pounds have been defrauded by individuals and also by organised crime. The buck has to stop at the Treasury and Mr Sunak.’

During a TV debate last Sunday, leadership rival Kemi Badenoch claimed that Mr Sunak had ignored her concerns that support schemes were vulnerable to fraud while she was a junior minister at the Treasury. He replied: ‘That is absolutely not right. We have taken tackling fraud incredibly seriously and set up all the systems in place to recover money from fraudsters... At this point dozens of arrests have already happened, and billions have been recovered.’

Adding that he was ‘proud’ of his record, he said that the new estimates for fraud on the bounce back loan scheme have been reduced by a third. The Government declined to comment.