Ministers have announced a clampdown on people who continue to claim child benefit payments even though they have moved abroad, in measures that could save the taxpayer £350m over five years.
The government said 2,600 people who had left the UK but still claimed the benefit had already been removed from the welfare system.
Tens of thousands more people who are fraudulently or erroneously claiming child benefit while living outside the UK now face having their payments stopped as part of the government’s crackdown.
The Cabinet Office is increasing the number of officials working on stopping child benefit fraud and error to 200 from next month, following a pilot programme in which 15 investigators stopped £17m in wrongful payments in less than a year.
Officials will use international travel data to check if claimants have moved overseas.
Georgia Gould, a Cabinet Office minister, said: “From September, we’ll have 10 times as many investigators saving hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. If you’re claiming benefits you’re not entitled to, your time is up.”
Child benefit is paid to more than 6.9 million families to support 11.9 million children, and is one of the most commonly accessed benefits in the UK.
People are no longer eligible to claim the benefit if they are outside the UK for more than eight weeks, barring exceptional circumstances. Claimants must inform HMRC if they are leaving the country for eight weeks or more. The government wants to raise awareness of these rules, in recognition that some people continue to claim the benefit in error.
The pilot was carried out jointly by the Public Sector Fraud Authority, the Home Office and HMRC, who compared a random sample of 200,000 claim records with international travel data. Where the data suggested a claimant had left the country, HMRC investigators performed manual checks before deciding whether benefits were being claimed incorrectly.
HMRC contacts claimants to inform them that their benefits will be stopped and details their rights to appeal.
The government has made cracking down on wrongful benefit payments a significant part of its efforts to cut spending. Benefit overpayments are estimated by the government to have cost the public purse £9.5bn in the year to March.
The public authorities (fraud, error and recovery) bill, which is making its way through parliament, has been called the “biggest ever crackdown on fraud against the public purse”. It gives the government the power to recover money directly from fraudsters’ bank accounts, a move which has been criticised because of its potential impact on the poorest claimants.
Earlier this year ministers attempted to reduce the government’s overall working-age benefit bill by £5bn a year with cuts to disability benefits, but were forced to backtrack in the face of a major Commons rebellion.
A heavily watered-down version of the benefits bill, which cut the health-related element of universal credit for some claimants, was approved by MPs last month. Despite the climbdown, 47 Labour MPs still voted against the bill.
