Southwark Council officers have won a number of awards for cracking down on fraud. It’s been a long journey over many years working well with the Police, fraud specialists and supported by all councillors to get serious about fraud.

Reactive fraud work for the last financial year resulted in 290 sanctions around council rented properties – recovered tenancies, benefits sanctions, etc. Another 151 properties were recovered. But the National Fraud Authority estimates 4% of Southwark’s 45,000 tenanted properties will be done so fraudulently – that’s 1,800 properties. So we clearly still have a huge problem to solve. This would make a huge dent in our council housing list.

This technique has also seen:

1. 434 blue badges and concessionary passes cancelled

2. £0.7M of housing benefit overpayment identified

3. 619 housing application cancelled

4. 1,988 singles person council tax discount wrongly claimed

Proactive anti-fraud work. 20% of new applications to join the housing waiting list are now being rejected as a result of data matching and identity checking. 12% of those already on the list about to be offered a property are being found out as not meeting the criteria. Sadly this data matching hash;t been applied to all those on the waiting list. This would remove 12% immediately and make it much clearer who should be on the list. I’ll continue to push for this.

What next?

We need to apply these techniques to school place applications to ensure confidence in the system.

Prodding for voter registration – nudging people to register to vote.

What other council areas do you think needs extra anti-fraud scrutiny?