Staff from the Department for Work and Pensions will get the power to arrest people, carry out searches and seize evidence in a new crackdown on benefit fraud. The Government's £200 million-a-year Fighting Fraud plan involves hiring 2,000 staff to go through two million cases.
The agents are already being recruited and DWP bosses hope to have them all in place by the autumn. Ministers claim the initiative will save £670m a year.
It comes after benefit overpayments due to fraud and error rocketed to a record £8.3bn in 2020/21, The Mirror reports - however, this includes errors by the department or claimants, not just deliberate fraud. Many of the new powers need an Act of Parliament, but it’s thought this would only be introduced from May 2023 at the earliest.
The proposed Act would make it easier to request bank account data of people whose cases have a “signal” of potential fraud. DWP staff - rather than police - will then make arrests, execute warrants, conduct searches and seize evidence.
Even if a case does not make it to court, they will then get power to hand out civil fines. Cases could be flagged by data-matching and algorithms.
Powers of arrest would be given to a smaller DWP team of investigators, not all 2,000 agents, it is understood. Fines will be a fixed percentage of the amount of suspected fraud per case.
At the moment the DWP can only request the data of an identifiable person. The Act would broaden those powers.
Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey said: “Thousands of trained specialists, combined with targeted new tools and powers, will mean we can keep up with fraud in today’s digital age and prevent, detect and deter those who would try to cheat the system.”
But Shadow Employment Minister Alison McGovern said the Tories “left the till open to organised crime” during Covid. She said if ministers were “serious about fraud, they would have taken action to get back the £11bn” lost to “dodgy PPE deals, loans and grants”.
