Andrew Western

With the leave of the House, I thank all hon. Members for their contributions. In the time I have, I will try to respond to some of the points raised. I have listened closely to the concerns set out by Members from across the House, and I will of course ensure that they are taken forward as the Bill progresses to the other place, but today I will resist all non-Government amendments. I will make initial comments in response to several Members, before turning specifically to the nature of the amendments and new clauses. The Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith), and the hon. Member for Mid Leicestershire (Mr Bedford), said that the Bill builds on the previous Administration’s work to tackle fraud and error. I have to say, I think that is a fairly generous interpretation of that work, not least because, as far as I can see, the previous Government introduced absolutely no powers for the Public Sector Fraud Authority to tackle fraud across the public sector, and, moreover, nothing on debt recovery. The only evidence we can find of any new powers the previous Government sought to introduce is in the eligibility verification space. I accept that they sought to do that, but they did so in a rather botched fashion, which was subject to significant criticism, and with none of the safeguards and oversight in place. We have now built those into the Bill. I absolutely agree with the Opposition spokesperson that the Government cannot be complacent in tackling fraud—and we will not be—but I say gently that, having allowed fraud and error in the welfare system to spiral to £9.7 billion at the time of the last election, the same cannot be said of the previous Government. The Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling), spoke of a broken welfare system. I do not want to be drawn into a debate on that, but a broken approach to tackling benefit fraud and error is certainly part of any problem that the Department faces.