A Treasury minister who resigned over the government’s “schoolboy” handling of fraudulent Covid business loans has said there has been “not a zippo” of detail about how the chancellor plans to deal with the issue. Theodore Agnew of Oulton, who was the Tories’ anti-fraud minister, publicly resigned from his Cabinet Office and Treasury posts on Monday over the government’s decision to write off £4.3bn in fraudulent loans. He called the oversight of the scheme “nothing less than woeful”. Discussing his dramatic exit in an interview with the Times, Lord Agnew said: “I didn’t want to blow my top, but I was very angry.” Agnew accused the government of “arrogance, indolence and ignorance” in its attitude to tackling fraud estimated to cost £29bn a year.
“This isn’t natural for me, I took no pleasure from it but the failure of government to tackle fraud felt so egregious, and the need for remedy so urgent, that I felt my only option left was to smash some crockery to get people to take notice,” Agnew said. “In life, one should try to stay inside the tent to win the arguments but ultimately there comes a breaking point.”
HMRC figures show fraudulent claims for furlough and other business relief schemes have resulted in a loss of an estimated £5.8bn. Reports suggest £4.3bn stolen of that sum has been written off as unrecoverable, but the Treasury has since disputed this figure. The minister’s dramatic departure drove Rishi Sunak to assure that the government would “do everything we can” to recover stolen funds. “I’m not ignoring it, and I’m definitely not ‘writing it off’,” the chancellor tweeted on Wednesday. However, Agnew told the Times that there had been “not a zippo” of detail about how the chancellor plans to tackle the situation. Agnew said his resignation, which comes as Boris Johnson battles to survive in his role as prime minister, was not an attack on the Tory leader, but that he could not remain in post. “Given that I am the minister for counter-fraud, it would be somewhat dishonest to stay on in that role if I am incapable of doing it properly. It is for this reason that I have sadly decided to tender my resignation as a minister across the Treasury and Cabinet Office with immediate effect,” he told the House of Lords on Monday.