Counter-fraud team reveals civic centre rule-breaking while warning of impact of trading standards cuts, reports Simon Allin, Local Democracy Reporter

Five employees of Enfield Council were caught with second jobs after switching to flexible working following the Covid-19 pandemic.

The council’s counter-fraud team uncovered the cases of undeclared secondary employment during investigations over the 2022/23 financial year. All of the individuals concerned are no longer employed by the local authority.

Since the pandemic struck, it has become normal for employees to work from home for part of the week. But a council report says this has led to new types of fraud, with undeclared secondary employment, ‘or multiple working’, being the most common.

Council staff have to declare any secondary employment to ensure there is no conflict of interest with the work they do for the authority or contractual conflict in terms of the hours worked.

The cases are detailed in the annual counter-fraud report, which was presented to a meeting of the council’s general purposes committee on Wednesday. Gemma Young, the council’s head of internal audit and risk management, told the meeting the authority was “looking at prosecution options” for the former employees.

Gemma added: “This being a new threat, we are part of a pan-London pilot exercise. We are talking about data matching across London, looking at other public sector bodies, just to ensure that we are getting value from our employees, that they are not working full-time elsewhere.”

Under questioning from the committee, Gemma said most employees are “flexible workers”, meaning they will be in the office for “the majority of the time”, but there is “still a big proportion of home working”.

Fay Hammond, the council’s executive director of resources, said there was no intention to change the flexible working practice and pointed out it had led to savings on office space.

Closing one section of Enfield Civic Centre was saving £100,000 per year, Fay explained, while staff said flexible working had improved their quality of life and wellbeing.

The counter-fraud team saved the council almost £2.6million during 2022/23. The largest saving of £1m resulted from nine fraudulent right-to-buy claims that were withdrawn following investigations.

The council also secured its largest-ever confiscation order after a local landowner and contractor were prosecuted over illegal tree-felling. As well as covering the cost of planting new trees, the landowner and contractor were told to pay £253,000 to be shared between the council, the Crown, and the courts.

In response to further questions, Gemma revealed the council’s decision to cut the number of trading standards officers from four to one was likely to affect counter-fraud investigations.

Gemma said: “We do the financial investigations work, so that could have an effect on the amount of POCR [proceeds of crime recoveries] that we get. We can’t do proceeds of crime recovery until there has been a successful prosecution, obviously […]

“It will affect us. There is a lot of counterfeit jewellery work in Enfield, for example, so I don’t know what the effect will be, but I imagine work would decrease given the decrease in officers.”

Gemma added that the counter-fraud team may no longer be able to replace staff who leave because of budget cuts.

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