Chamber and committees

It is based on something that Jamie Greene talked about. Please correct me if I am wrong—I might have got it wrong, because I did not think that you did this—but I think you said that, on housing benefit and in one or two other cases, you match the data sets and, where you identify fraud, you tell the DWP about the discrepancies.

I am a bit confused by that. If you counted something on one occasion, why would you think that you did not need to involve the same sort of bodies the next time?

Okay. To what extent do you consider that all public bodies and private organisations that are in receipt of public money should participate in the NFI, in line with the recommendations that were made by our predecessor committee in parliamentary session 5?

I can see the argument with regard to the difficulty in including somebody who has been contracted to do work with public moneys. However, for example, no universities have volunteered in the 2024-25 NFI. Why would that be the case? They are publicly funded.

Just for my knowledge as much as anything else, can you tell me how GDPR impacts on your seeing whether fraud has taken place?

My question was not really aimed at whether you were doing something right or wrong. The issue is that, under current circumstances, some public bodies are mandated to do this task, while others that access public funds are not. There are gaps that mean that one public body has to give this information, while another publicly funded organisation does not have to.

Thanks very much.

Okay—thank you.

Okay. Thanks for that.

Okay.