In total, £22.6bn was paid in 4.5 million grants to businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic, which were launched without pre-payment checks, leading to £1.1bn – equivalent to 5% – of claims being fraudulent. So far, local authorities have recovered funds from 1,900 companies.

When the grant scheme was first launched, the Department for Business (BEIS) did not require pre-payment checks, which led to the majority of the estimated £1.1bn losses from error and fraud across all the schemes.

After the first few months of operation, BEIS introduced much tighter checks to thwart the fraudsters.