The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has criticised the government’s lack of action to recover losses from error and fraud in Covid grant schemes totalling £1.1bn.

The latest PAC report found that three years on from the £22.6bn spent on business support schemes for during the pandemic, the government had only recovered £20.9m of the estimated £1.1bn in fraud and error losses by May 2023.

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) said it would take until the end of 2025 to recover the losses from fraudulent claims and estimated that it would cost between £400m and £500m to check the veracity of every claim.

The covid grant scheme ran for two years from March 2020 to March 2022, and local authorities handled applications from local businesses.