Housing Benefit Recoveries and Fraud data
The latest national statistics on Housing Benefits Recoveries and Fraud (HBRF) data produced by the Department for Work and Pensions were released on 13 March 2013 according to the arrangements approved by the UK Statistics Authority.
This data contains statistics relating to Housing Benefit fraud volumes and amounts of incorrectly overpaid benefit. It is aggregate level data received on a quarterly basis from each Local Authority.
Data has already been released for each quarter of 2008/09, 2009/10, 2010/11 and 2011/12. This release includes provisional local authority level statistics for Q1 and Q2 of 2012/13.
Historically, the figures in these releases have not allowed for imputation of any missing values and headline numbers were based on the summation of the data presented in the tables. As some Authorities do not return a form, and some cannot answer all the questions, the presence of missing values can affect the interpretation of trends.
Therefore to help users understand the possible impact, this year’s First Release includes imputed totals for the whole country across the full time series. More details on the methodology chosen to produce these imputed values can be found in the First Release.
This set of statistics has recently been assessed by the UK Statistics Authority. See: http://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/assessment/assessment/assessment-reports/assessment-report-216---statistics-on-housing-benefit-recoveries-and-fraud--and-the-abstract-of-statistics-on-benefits.pdf
Latest Releases
March 2013 Statistical First Release 
provides a structured overview of the National Statistics Housing Benefit Recoveries and Fraud data published by DWP
To access the provisional 2012/2013 release in full click here. 
Previous HBRF releases are available here.
Further information on the statistics is available here.
Historical publications
The historical statistics available on fraud performance relating to Speed of Processing / Right Time Indicator / Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit Performance Measures or the period up to June 2007 (Quarter 1) are based on clerical Administrative Data returns by individual Local Authorities at aggregate level. From July 2007 to March 2008 there were no fraud performance figures published due to a DWP wide data transfer embargo which ran from November 2007 to July 2008.
Additional tables are available here
Coverage: Great Britain
Geographic Breakdown: Local Authority and County
Frequency: Bi-annually
Next Release Date: 11 September 2013
