Tackling Fraud and Preventing Government Waste — House of Commons, 2022-02-01
Topic: Mixed Topics
Alison Emily Thewliss (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is absolutely correct to draw attention to that. It is one of many deficiencies in the Home Office systems as well. It seems that those with money are given a free pass, whereas those who come here with more humble undertakings to begin their lives here, to work and to build a family, end up being penalised and having to pay an awful lot more in fees, and experiencing all the challenges that that brings Hon. Members may think that some of these issues with Companies House seem a bit remote from the real world and the real lives of our constituents, but that could not be further from the truth. During lockdown, a company in Glasgow using myriad company structures made claims under the furlough scheme, but employees of that company never received the money that they were entitled to. Even if the company directors ended up being prosecuted, or HMRC ended up getting its money back, those employees would still get nothing. That shows the complete unfairness in the system. I would be interested to know whether the Government have any figures, from when they have chased down these companies, on how many employees never saw the money that they should have got and that they needed to get by For those completely excluded from the covid support schemes, this is all the more galling. Limited company directors and pay-as-you-earn taxpayers were left out because they were deemed too much of a fraud risk, and new mothers who had taken time off to have a child in the preceding three years lost out because calculating their maternity leave was thought to be too complex. Yet as they were being told that by Ministers, the real fraudsters were raking it in, with drugs gangs getting payouts, and many of the people who benefited will never be caught These most recent examples of the Government’s relaxed attitude to the wasting of public funds are by no means the only cases. Best for Britain’s "scandalous spending tracker" sets out the following examples—I will list just some of them; otherwise, we could be here all afternoon, and I am sure that others want to speak—since the current inhabitant of No. 10 Downing Street came to office. It categorises them in three ways: as "crony contracts", "duff deals" and "outrageous outgoings" Here are a few highlights: £11 million on blue passports; over half a million on chauffeuring Government documents, never mind Government Ministers; £56 million contracting to big consulting firms outside tendering processes; £29 million on the festival of Brexit; £900,000 painting a plane; £900,000 researching a bridge to Ireland, which I could have saved the Government money on, because I did a second-year geography project—at high school, not university—that could have told them it was a ropey idea; £32 million on unusable PPE suits; over £38 million on a test and trace contract that was not fulfilled; £10 billion on a failed test and trace system; over £300 million on expired PPE, and billions more on contracts for friends and family of Ministers and Conservative party donors through the fast-track lane All that totalled £25 billion, and all of it at a time when the screw was being tightened on those who have the least, with cuts to universal credit, some getting no money at all, and more effort spent chasing down those who happened to wrongly claim child benefit than those who deliberately defrauded the public purse to the tune of billions I find it difficult to understand why the Government are so careless with our money and why they do not want to act on fraud and money laundering. The question "who benefits?" continues to rattle around in my head. While those on the Government Benches do not like the inference that it was them and their chums, I wonder whether the fact that this coincides with the undermining of the Electoral Commission and the relaxing of the rules on overseas donors is any kind of accident. It is not just me; the Centre for American Progress flagged recently: "Uprooting Kremlin-linked oligarchs will be a challenge given the close ties between Russian money and the United Kingdom’s ruling conservative party, the press, and its real estate and financial industry." This should worry us all, but it does not seem to worry those on the Government Benches Lord Agnew’s estimate of the total fraud loss across UK Government Departments is £29 billion per year. That could go, as he suggested, to tax cuts or, as we on the SNP Benches would argue for, to investment in public services and increases in social security. Either way, there is a cost to this fraud, and it remains absolutely baffling that this UK Government have continued to let it go on their watch.