In a series of articles, Mark Rowe reviews the progress of the Labour Government so far, in terms of crime prevention.
While the Crime and Policing Bill is Labour’s first, and therefore presumably best, effort to address what ministers variously describe as an ‘epidemic’ or ‘crisis’ of violent crime, other, less prominent Bills are going ahead. Such as the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill. It would introduce powers to make the Public Sector Fraud Authority a separate body from the Cabinet Office, where it sits, to investigate public sector fraud outside of the tax and social security system; and powers for the Department for Work and Pensions to address fraud and error in the social security system. PSFA authorised investigators would have power to enter and search premises subject to a court warrant; and would be able to seize material. Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Liz Kendall hailed it for ‘turning off the tap to criminals who cheat the system’.
A cross-party committee of MPs looking at the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill on February 25 brought up covid loan fraud; the Bill would double the time limit for civil claims against covid fraud from six to 12 years. Georgia Gould, Minister in the Cabinet Office, described this as part of ‘tough new powers’. While Labour while campaigning before the July 2024 election promised to go after covid loan fraudsters, those giving evidence to MPs at committee stage gave no indication that the authorities can recover covid loan fraud; whether due to lack of police capacity (hence the extra proposed powers for the PSFA), or the trail going cold.
Alex Rothwell, Chief Executive, of the NHS Counter Fraud Authority, admitted generally that ‘frankly, policing had significant challenges with fraud, and still does, in terms of the volume of attacks against individuals and businesses, which made supporting the public sector almost an impossible ask’. He spoke of taking ‘a cost-benefit approach as well; although there is a moral imperative, we increasingly look at things in a commercial sense and at whether there is financial value in recovering funds’. Kristin Jones likewise stressed it’s ‘very difficult to get money back from fraudsters, especially where it is organised, because the money disappears into different accounts in different names, and overseas through lots of corporate bodies’.
On data, Alex Rothwell pointed to ‘rich data sets that the Government actually hold and our ability to communicate inter-department. Those data sets are critical, yet it is still challenging to obtain data. In many ways, the data protection legislation already provides the ability to share information, particularly where fraud is concerned, although the application of it is often quite risk averse. I wish it had been called the Data Sharing Act and not the Data Protection Act’.
Staying with data, Rothwell pointed out that ‘very few transactions, if any, take place that do not have a digital or electronic footprint of some kind’, which would give authorities scope for ‘data analysis’. Rothwell spoke of the gain lately from ‘a ubiquitous case recording system that exists across the national health service’, and ‘improved data analysis on large datasets that exist on, for example, national contracting’. Earlier in his evidence, however, he warned of ‘increasingly limited opportunities to pursue criminal investigations. Although we [the NHS CFA] maintain a strong investigative capability that deals with more serious types of criminality, we know about the challenges in the criminal justice system — the disclosure burden is high, it is incredibly expensive to run criminal investigations, and often they take eight years or longer to reach fruition — so we are increasingly looking at how else we can deal with fraud when it is presented to us’.
In other words, we can say, weaknesses in the overall public sector – in this case, the courts backlog – makes a mockery of work earlier in the criminal justice chain. To return to Mr Rothwell, he told MPs that ‘in many ways, it is the low-value, high-volume cases that we see that are more challenging, where we are perhaps seeking to recover funds from someone who has taken £5,000’. We might add that criminals can learn or sense this; and carry out frauds below that rough threshold accordingly, that aren’t worth the authorities’ while to go after.
Mr Rothwell, formerly a senior policeman, made the broader point that police this century has placed an ‘emphasis on drug supply, knife crime and firearms’, which has meant ‘little capacity in policing to tackle public sector fraud’. In a public order or terrorism or other crisis, ‘crimes like fraud are perhaps easier to put on hold for a time’.
Kristin Jones, formerly of the Serious Fraud Office and the Crown Prosecution Service, in giving evidence to MPs alongside Mr Rothwell made a more profound point still: “The worry is that the public are exposed so much to fraud that its seriousness gets watered down in their mind. You have these [online] forums where you can recommend how to claim various things from the Government and how to hit sweet spots to get that benefit or grant. So it has changed and perhaps people are not as shocked by fraud as they used to be.”
This suggestion that wrong-doing has become the norm – ‘when you answer your telephone, there is a good chance you have a scammer at the other end’, as Kristin Jones said – had an echo in a debate by members of Parliament last Thursday afternoon, March 20, on knife crime and young people. The Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty, opening the debate, described his time in Haringay, ‘an area of London where murders and stabbings become so commonplace as to elicit little more than a shrug from local residents; where police tape closing a road or a local park is normalised to the point of merely being an inconvenience; where the murder of a child does not make the national news’.
Replying to the debate, Home Office minister Dame Diana Johnson spoke of how, ‘under the safer streets mission led by the Home Secretary, we are driving a whole-of-Government approach to halving violence against women and girls, halving knife crime, and restoring confidence in the policing and justice system’. She summed up that such crime was a ‘national crisis. The public want change and we are determined to deliver it.’
