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28 Apr 22
The Treasury will spend £25m on a 'fraud squad' aimed at recovering funds wrongly given out in Covid-19 support schemes, with hopes the team will be up and running by the summer.
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27 Apr 22
Poor health including from 'long Covid' will drag economic activity down in the UK by £8bn in this year alone, a think-tank has warned.
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27 Apr 22
The government’s apparent lack of long-term plan to recover overdue debt issued via its £47bn Covid-19 business loan scheme means fraudsters could “walk away with billions of taxpayers’ money”,...
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13 Apr 22
Covid-19 has exacerbated existing issues affecting the ability of the UK public sector to attract the best candidates to finance roles.
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26 Mar 22
MPs have criticised HMRC for lacking a clear plan to deal with the huge level of tax debt that has built up since the onset of Covid-19.
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25 Feb 22
The government “simply has no idea” whether its £1.9bn Covid-19 youth employment scheme has been successful, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee has said.
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25 Feb 22
The billions spent on the Covid-19 vaccination programme in England represented value for money given the number of lives saved in once-in-a-lifetime conditions, the National Audit Office has said.
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15 Feb 22
The government is facing questions over whether leaked emails suggest civil servants were told to alter data relating to personal protective equipment bought amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
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17 Jan 22
The Treasury has written off the possibility of recovering most of the money lost to fraud and error during the pandemic, according to official documents.
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11 Jan 22
English council’s finances were not as badly affected by Covid-19 as had been expected, according to new research – but the authors warned against government complacency in the coming years amid the...
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16 Dec 21
The Bank of England has raised the cost of borrowing for the first time since the onset of Covid-19 despite fears of the Omicron variant slowing the economy, citing worries about inflation.
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14 Dec 21
The Bank of England must not delay raising interest rates despite the economic risks around the Omicron variant of Covid-19, the International Monetary Fund has said.
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14 Dec 21
The UK’s “rapid” economic recovery after lockdowns and the government’s efforts to cut the deficit following the large Covid-19 support schemes have led to rating agency Fitch affirming its judgement...
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30 Nov 21
Fraud and error in pandemic support programmes have led to head of the National Audit Office Gareth Davies qualifying his opinion on the 2020-21 accounts of the Department for Business, Energy and...
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25 Oct 21
The Department for Work and Pensions’ Cyber Resilience Centre prevented £1.7bn of organised fraud against Universal Credit during the first nine months of Covid-19.
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18 Oct 21
A council is to use £10.5m of reserves earmarked for tackling Covid-19 to slash the amount of capital borrowing needed to fund services under special arrangements approved earlier this year by...
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18 Oct 21
More than half of public services examined in CIPFA’s 2021 Performance Tracker, published today, are suffering backlogs due to Covid-19.
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21 Sep 21
The UK government borrowed more than expected in August, while inflation pushed up interest payments.
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13 Aug 21
Two companies that targeted 41 councils with fraudulent Covid-19 grant claims have been wound up after High Court hearings.
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12 Aug 21
Northern Ireland’s Department of Health is facing questions over its accounting treatment of millions of pounds that might otherwise have been redistributed to other departments.
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27 Jul 21
It is too early to withdraw extraordinary monetary policy support, despite high inflation and growing employment, a Bank of England official has said.
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25 Jul 21
Poor quality assessments by departmental accounting officers have reduced the value for money of government spending during the Covid-19 pandemic, a Public Accounts Committee report has found.
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16 Jul 21
A worst case scenario with repeated lockdowns and a slow economic recovery would leave a county council in southern England with a shortfall of £220.3m from next year until 2024-25, the...
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30 Jun 21
Government departments lack urgency in their efforts to measure fraud and error relating to Covid-19 spending, according to Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee.
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8 Jun 21
The cost of government responses to Covid-19 in Northern Ireland topped £6bn as both Stormont and Westminster worked to fight the health and economic crises caused by the virus.