Nearly half of child benefit cases in anti-fraud trial were wrongly flagged

Home Office travel records used in a trial of a controversial anti-fraud crackdown under which thousands of parents lost their child benefit were so flawed that almost half of the families flagged as having emigrated were still living in Britain, it has emerged.

- Luke Butterly Lisa O'Carroll

The benefit is not payable if the claimant is abroad for more than eight weeks unless there are exceptional circumstances. The pilot scheme to track such people saved HMRC £17m but 46% of the families targeted were incorrectly suspected of fraud, a margin of error far in excess of the 1% to 5% scientifically acceptable.

In Northern Ireland, 78% were incorrectly identified as not having returned from trips abroad and 129 flagged as having left the country when only 28 had actually done so.

Kim Johnson, the Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, called for an urgent investigation after being contacted by several constituents who had their benefits stopped.

The results of the pilot raise fundamental questions about using Home Office data on who might be out of the country to infer fraud, experts said.

"Relying on Home Office data for punitive purposes is always going to be problematic," said Colin Yeo, an immigration barrister at Garden Court Chambers. Full details of the anti-fraud pilot were not yet known, but Yeo said it was "quite alarming" to see Home Office data used "when the data so obviously doesn't bear the weight that they are placing on it".