The Chair said that an additional sheet had been circulated (attached to the minutes) in response to questions that he had raised.

Christine Bidwell, Head of Investigations, introduced the report. She said that the team currently investigate welfare benefit fraud, council tax fraud and corporate fraud (listed in paragraph 2.1). The team has recently merged with the Internal Audit in order to share resources and pool expertise. The government is setting up a Single Fraud Investigation Service into which local authority staff who work solely or primarily on welfare benefit fraud (housing benefits at present and subsequently universal credit) will be transferred to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Each local authority has been asked to identify how many staff would be in scope for transfer to DWP.

Christine Bidwell made further points in response to questions:

• the council receives a grant for administering housing benefit, an element of which is used for investigation of fraud. It is expected that, after the first year, the grant will be cut but, at this point in time, it is not known by how much
• there isn’t sufficient information at the moment to model the financial impact of the changes
• one of the challenges is to make sure there will be sufficient remaining staff to deal with corporate fraud
• some fraud is quite sophisticated and is becoming more so

Councillor Samantha George said that she had sat on the Benefit Sanctions Panel in the past and had been struck by the variability of outcome for different councils, with some councils pursuing fraud less vigorously than Merton. She was therefore not surprised that the government had sought to centralise this function.

Members stressed the importance of continuing to receive local information about welfare benefit fraud to inform proceedings on council tax and corporate fraud cases. They also wondered how councillors would convey their view on individual cases known to them through ward casework and how queries would be likely to be dealt with via DWP. Christine Bidwell said that there would be a mechanism for sharing knowledge and extracting data but the detail is not known at this stage.

Members highlighted the need to retain sufficient experienced investigators to carry out the level of work that the council wished to pursue on corporate fraud cases. For example, blue badge fraud is an area that is important to local residents as they are angered by abuse of the system. They also noted the concern expressed in the report that the council could be left vulnerable to fraud if a significant number of investigators are transferred to DWP.

Members wished to continue to monitor to make sure that the council did not lose out financially compared to other councils.

RESOLVED:

1)    that the Head of Democracy Services should summarise the concerns raised at the meeting and send these to the Assistant Director of Corporate Governance and the Cabinet Member for Finance with the Commission’s recommendation that these be forwarded to the DWP as part of the council’s response on plans for the transfer of staff.

2)    To recommend that the cabinet member for Finance should quickly determine the council’s strategy in relation to the number of staff to be transferred to DWP