Agenda item

Members received the progress report on Anti-Fraud Plan 2024/25 which detailed the work undertaken by the Shared Anti-Fraud Services (SAFS) and Council Officers to protect the Council against the threat of fraud and delivery of the Council’s Anti-Fraud Plan for 2024/25.  

During the discussion the following points were raised:

·         The Chair commented that it was a job well done, a lot of money had been saved, and they were clearly doing some excellent work.

·         A Member asked a question around paragraph 11 in the report regarding alternatives to prosecutions and which cases were appropriate for a lighter hand and what happens in those circumstances.

·         The SAFS Officer responded that they have to make sure that prosecution is appropriate because that’s the most severe outcome. The Council has a number of options dependent on the service area impacted, i.e. council house stock, when recovering properties that have been misused, if they have been sublet, we might want to recover the property, so that’s a sanction, actually bringing that property back into stock, terminating the person’s tenancy. We may look for what’s called an unlawful profit order, i.e. if the tenant’s made a profit from subletting that property, then we want that money from that person because they’ve made a profit from our asset. If the offence is serious enough, i.e. if they committed an offence under the Fraud Act or the Prevention of Social Housing Fraud Act, we could seek prosecution. There are a number of other options as well, i.e. a local authority caution which is something like a police caution where it will go on record that they’ve committed an offence, but it won’t proceed to prosecution. There is also the issue of a seek and desist notice, where we suspect somebody may have been sublet but we can’t prove this and going to court might be expensive or time consuming. We can issue this notice where we tell somebody to stop subletting and bring the property back into use.  With regards council tax there is some fairly draconian legislation where fines and penalties can be imposed if people try to defraud the council tax system, they can choose to accept and pay the money back and that will be it. This is a better outcome than prosecution as that can be expensive and a delay in resolution. Ultimately we are looking to recover money that the Council is losing.

·         A Member asked with regard to Paragraph 18 in the report, what the cabinet office third data sets are.

·         The SAFS Officer responded  that with the National Fraud Initiative it’s run every two years, it’s a mandated exercise provided by Cabinet Office who use an external IT provider to take from the council, from this authority, the tenants data, housing waiting list data, payroll data, council tax, parking data, creditors data and probably three or four other data sets on the last working day of October. It is then uploaded to the NFI Cabinet Office portal. Every council across England and Wales provide this data at the same time The NHS in London provide data and there are a number of third parties that also provide data. The Cabinet Office then run a number of rules across those various data sets and what they are looking for is, if a person works for one area but there’s also someone with the same name working for a different area, whether this is fraud or whether that person has permission to work for both areas. There is a lot of work to do with these matches to actually identify where the fraud is. Therefore, out of 1300 matches, there may only be 10 or 20 discrepancies, some will be errors of where the data is out of date.

·         A Member asked about the Key Amnesty and whether it had been in other areas and worked more effectively or whether WHBC was a typical result.

·         The SAFS Officer responded that, for a leafy borough, he wouldn’t expect it to produce a huge amount of work or outcomes. It was used as an awareness campaign to say to people this is what tenancy fraud looks like. It might be that someone is subletting, or they may have abandoned a tenancy because they want to live elsewhere but want to keep the tenancy as a fallback position. The losers are the residents because that property is then not available for someone who genuinely needs it. It’s a way to raise awareness and encourage people to report fraud but it is also for those where it might tip their conscience, and they hand in keys to the council, and nobody will take further action. Other authorities have done, and they’ve had two or three properties back. In London borough you’ll get approximately 50 properties back in a month because there’s that turnover of accommodation in London.

RESOLVED:

Members noted the report.