Emergency funding measures launched to help millions of businesses survive through pandemic restrictions resulted in the Government paying out £22.6m.Treasury Minister Lord Agnew later resignedThe office found that councils were not notified of new schemes until they were publicly announced by the Treasury and faced “significant practical challenges” scrambling to respond.
“Early schemes lost significant sums to error and fraud, but [the business department] addressed this in later iterations,” said Gareth Davies, head of the NAO.The report found that officials learned lessons from the initial response in 2020 by strengthening governance arrangements and introducing pre-payment checks, which helped to greatly reduce the level of losses in later schemes.
However, the report points out that all recovered monies had to be paid back to the Treasury, so local authorities have had no financial incentive to identify losses beyond those identified in initial random sampling.