Child Benefit action to save £350 million from claimants abroad

• A new specialist team is expected to stop over £350 million in Child Benefit fraud and error over the next five years.
• The move follows a successful pilot where just 15 investigators stopped around £17 million in wrongful payments in under 12 months.
• Thousands of people who left the UK but carried on claiming Child Benefit have already been removed from the system.

Child Benefit will be stripped from tens of thousands of people who have moved abroad in a major clampdown expected to save £350 million over the next five years.

A new specialist team will use international travel data to track if claimants have gone overseas, so are no longer entitled to the payments.

The move follows a successful pilot which has already removed 2,600 people from the system who had left the UK but continued to claim Child Benefit.

A team of just 15 investigators successfully prevented around £17 million being incorrectly paid out in under 12 months.

The government is rapidly expanding this highly effective unit as part of the Plan for Change. The new team will have over 200 people from next month, sending a clear warning to those trying to scam the system.

Cabinet Office Minister Georgia Gould said:

This government is putting a stop to people claiming benefits when they aren’t eligible to do so.

From September, we’ll have ten times as many investigators saving hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money.

If you’re claiming benefits you’re not entitled to, your time is up.

Child Benefit is paid to over 6.9 million families, supporting 11.9 million children. It is one of the most widely accessed forms of benefit in the UK and is administered by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).

If a claimant is outside the UK for more than eight weeks, Child Benefit payments may stop unless there are exceptional circumstances. Claimants must inform HMRC if they are outside the UK for this length of time or longer.

The pilot was carried out by the Public Sector Fraud Authority, the Home Office and HMRC. Under the Digital Economy Act, they matched a random sample of 200,000 Child Benefit records with international travel data.

Where the data suggested a claimant had left the country, specialist investigators from HMRC stepped in to perform their own checks before deciding whether benefits were being claimed incorrectly. The pilot was concluded in under 12 months and delivered savings of over one million pounds per investigator.

Alongside tougher checks, this renewed drive will raise awareness of the rules, recognising that some errors are genuine mistakes. Every case is reviewed by a human investigator and HMRC will reach out directly to families as part of any investigation to resolve matters swiftly.

This crackdown on fraud and error protects hardworking families who play by the rules and ensures every pound of taxpayer money goes where it should.