Philip Davies – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Philip Davies on 2014-03-11.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of (a) men and (b) women convicted of benefit fraud in each of the last five years received a prison sentence; and what the average prison sentence was for those of each gender so convicted.

Jeremy Wright

The Department for Work and Pensions operates a tough series of specific penalties for benefit fraud that run alongside the criminal justice system. The Welfare Reform Act 2012 toughened penalties for those who commit, or attempt to commit benefit fraud. We have introduced a financial administrative penalty as an alternative to prosecution which, for the first time, can be applied to attempted fraud.

The Government has also introduced a tougher loss of benefit penalty to restrict benefits to people convicted of benefit fraud or who have accepted an administrative penalty. Benefits can be reduced for periods of 13 weeks, 26 weeks or 3 years, dependent on the number of benefit fraud offences committed within a specified period, where the latest offence results in a conviction.

Judges make their decisions independently of Government based on the facts of each case. The maximum penalty for fraud is 10 years in prison.

The number of defendants proceeded against at magistrates’ court found guilty and sentenced at all courts for offences relating to benefit fraud, with sentencing outcomes and the average custodial sentence length by gender, in England and Wales, from 2008 to 2012 (latest data available) can be viewed in the table.

Please note that court proceedings statistics for the year 2013 are planned to be published by the Ministry of Justice in May 2014.