The LGA welcomes the opportunity to respond to the annual consultation on the National Fraud Initiative (NFI) workplan and scale of fees.
Introduction
1. The LGA welcomes the opportunity to respond to the annual consultation on the National Fraud Initiative (NFI) workplan and scale of fees.
Specific Questions
Question A. Do you agree with the proposal to mandate the social care datasets of residential care homes and personal budgets in the NFI 2024/25 exercise, once the Legislative Reform Order is complete? Please provide your reasons why?
2. As outlined in our response to the consultation on adult social care data matching in November 2023 we agree with this proposal.
Question B. Do you Do you have any additional comments on the proposed data requirements for the 2024/25 work programme, set out in Appendix 1?
3. We have no further comments to add to what we said in our earlier consultation response on how this applies to the NFI programme.
Question C. Do you have any comments on the proposal to retain the existing fee model for the NFI 2024/25 exercise? Please consider:
i) the fee model used to generate the NFI 2024/25 fee scale
ii) the review of FraudHub use and its effect on match returns for the two-yearly NFI exercise;
iii) the continued exclusion of social care data from the fee model and the
proposal to supplement the cost of social care data matching through
unspent funds from the NFI 2020/21 exercise
4. As stated in our earlier consultation response referred to above, we argue that it is logical for there to be no charge for the whole NFI exercise and for information provided under NFI without recharge between public sector organisations. We would urge a re-think of the approach.
5. Participation in the exercise is mandatory and none of the charges are optional so the charging, billing and paying exercise is effectively just an inefficient bureaucratic mechanism to transfer relatively small sums of funding between different parts of the public sector. Making the exercise freely available to local authorities would be more logical and would save administrative time and resources across the whole public sector.
6. Removing the charging mechanism would bring the NFI into line with arrangements elsewhere. There are no charges for checking case-by-case records for social care financial assessments with DWP and we are not expecting any charges for accessing HMRC client capital asset data and self-assessment data under arrangements currently being piloted.
Question D. Do you agree with the proposal to uplift fees by 6% (equivalent to 3% per annum), linked to our operational cost increases between 2021 and 2023? Please provide your reasons why
7. If charges have to applied (and as outlined above we think this is unnecessary), then it is accepted that it is logical that they should be increased in line with inflation.
Question E. Do you have any comments on the proposal to retain the penalty fee at 5% for late or poor quality data submissions?
8. We have no comments on this proposal.
Contact:
Bevis Ingram
Senior Adviser Finance
Phone: 079 2070 2354
Email: [email protected]