The Treasury is offering a salary of £84,000 for the first Covid counter-fraud commissioner, a role Labour promised to introduce in its election manifesto.
An advert for the role, which is for a fixed, one-year term, has been published on GOV.UK’s public appointments webpage. The commissioner will be expected to work three days per week in the role and will report directly to the chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
The commissioner “will be supported by a small team of Treasury civil servants and will need to work closely with officials and ministers across government”, the job advert says.
Reeves first announced Labour’s plan to appoint a Covid corruption commissioner to recoup billions of pounds lost to Covid fraud, with a “hit squad of investigators” to support them, last October, while she was shadow chancellor.
She confirmed in July, following Labour’s election victory, that she had kickstarted the recruitment process.
The commissioner will scrutinise contracts awarded during the government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic and “ensure that everything possible is being done to recover public money lost to pandemic-related fraud and underperforming contracts”, according to the job advert.
In a foreword to the job ad, Treasury second permanent secretary Beth Russell said the commissioner will need to work closely with the Department of Health and Social Care and draw on additional expertise in the Public Sector Fraud Authority, government debt management function and government commercial function “to be effective” in the role.
The successful candidate “will have the collaborative skills to drive true joint working and will be able to present their conclusions effectively to parliament and the public”, she added.
“The role demands a highly-skilled, credible, and suitably experienced candidate who will play a vital national role.”
The commissioner will initially focus on personal protective equipment contracts but may also lead assessments into other major covid schemes such as furlough, bounce back loans, business support grants, "Eat Out to Help Out" and Universal Credit fraud where the tsar deems it necessary.
A report by Transparency International UK into Covid-19 public procurement, published this week, found 135 contracts worth £15.3bn of public funds – nearly a third of all pandemic procurement by value – carry a high risk of corruption, almost as much as the entire annual Home Office budget. It also found that government departments awarded almost £4.1bn in public funds to suppliers with political connections to the party of government at the time during the pandemic, including through the infamous "VIP" lanes.