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Social Security (Loss of Benefit) Amendment Regulations 2010

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the regulations, as my noble friend Lord Skelmersdale did when the parent provision was discussed in this House last year. As the Minister said, it is important that benefit fraud is addressed quickly and effectively, not only to save the taxpayer—although such a motivation is of course enormously important—but to retain public confidence in the system and ensure that benefits are targeted accurately towards those who need them most. I echo the Minister's closing remarks. However, I take this opportunity to probe a little further the statistics on just how prevalent benefit fraud is. In our debates on the Welfare Reform Act 2009, the Minister said that the Government had reduced fraud across all benefits to 0.6 per cent of benefit spend; he repeated that figure just now. That figure sounds like good news, although it is rather less impressive when we learn the absolute figure, which he gave us earlier: that benefit fraud, although halved since 2001, still accounts for £1.1 billion. How much of that £1.1 billion is fraud within the working-age benefits system, and what percentage of working-age benefits is fraudulently obtained? That £1.1 billion is an enormous amount of money, but even so, it does not reflect the true cost to the taxpayer. Undeclared work while claiming unemployment benefit, for example, hits the taxpayers’ purse twice: once in benefits wrongly claimed and, secondly, in income tax not paid. It is quite right, therefore, that the Government should take steps to deter claimants from fraudulent claims. Restricting benefits will, we hope, prove an effective method of achieving that. I am reassured to hear the Minister say that administrative errors will not be penalised. Given the complexity of the benefits system, I would also be interested to hear whether there has been a similar improvement recently in the number of administrative errors made and the amount of money that they have cost the taxpayer.