Whitehall ‘moving too slowly’ on Covid fraud

MINISTERS are still being ‘too slow’ to claw back taxpayers’ money lost to Covid fraud and error, a senior MP has warned.

Public accounts committee chairman Dame Meg Hillier said the Government had a ‘golden opportunity’ to learn from the lessons of the pandemic to deal better with risk.

In her annual report, she cited studies showing that fraud against the taxpayer soared from £5.5 billion in 2018-20 to £21 billion in the most recent two years.

While accepting some mistakes and scams were inevitable as departments scrambled to keep businesses afloat and support those who were left out of work by lockdown restrictions, she warned: ‘Government is being too slow to recover taxpayer losses.’

Dame Meg said her committee had challenged the Department for Work and Pensions about why benefits fraud remained so high, while HMRC forecasts it will recover only a quarter of what it lost.

She said the Department for Health had wasted an ‘extraordinary’ £14.9 billion in the past two years on unnecessary or useless PPE, but added that Whitehall must treat people ‘fairly and with humanity’ as it tries to recover lost public money.

Dame Meg also laid out a series of ‘ repeated problems’ that Whitehall must address better, including a ‘disconnect’ between projects being commissioned and delivered, as well as an ‘unprecedented turnover of ministers’ in the past year.

She said a ‘frustrated minister’ had told her: ‘I cannot believe that I am dealing with a string of gentleman amateurs on such important and complex programmes.’