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.
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”,...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
Government departments lack urgency in their efforts to measure fraud and error relating to Covid-19 spending, according to Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee.
