15 November 2002
The former minister for welfare reform told a conference of counter-fraud experts that the government mistakenly viewed fraud as an acute, rather than a chronic, problem. It had failed to live up to a green paper promise to ensure that new benefit programmes designed fraud out of the system.
'Some of the most elementary lessons that you as an organisation were preaching five years ago have still to be learned by government,' he told IPF's Better Governance Forum.
Field said that fraud cost the UK at least £12bn a year. He called for the establishment of a Ministry for Countering Fraud, which he said would focus the minds of ministers. 'Fraud [at the moment] is a momentary interest. It rises up the agenda, and catches a senior politician's interest, and then they have to move on to a new topic,' he added.
The former minister, who had responsibility for fraud in the then Department for Social Security for 13 weeks, used the examples of Individual Learning Accounts and the Working Families Tax Credit to back up his points.
ILAs have now been abandoned following widespread claims of fraud and abuse. The WFTC has not failed in such an obvious manner, although it is soon to be superseded. But Field suggested there were flaws in the system that dedicated fraudsters could exploit.
Field claimed that as a minister he had requested a review of family credit, the benefit that preceded WFTC. He had asked for this to be minuted but now could find no trace of the request.
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