Covid fraud and error cost taxpayers £10.9bn, report will say

Mr Hayhoe is expected to reveal the full scale of Covid-19 financial fraud when his final report is shared with MPs on Tuesday.

A lack of anti-fraud controls in Covid schemes that were set up quickly by ministers in Boris Johnson's government are expected to be highlighted in the report and blamed for the huge figure.

Rushed rollouts meant "accepting a high level of fraud risk, without plans for managing or mitigating this risk," it will say.

Details of the report were first published by the Sunday Mirror.

In September the government launched a voluntary repayment scheme for people and businesses to return pandemic scheme money with no questions asked until the end of December.

Mr Hayhoe has been tasked by Chancellor Rachel Reeves with trying to recover the public money lost to fraud and underperforming contracts using his experience in procurement as the former chair of an NHS trust.

His previous reports found that pandemic-era PPE contracts cost the British taxpayer £1.4bn on undelivered contracts and unusable gowns, masks and gloves.

Only a small fraction of that - £182m - has been recovered by HM Treasury.

The National Crime Agency is separately investigating possible criminal offences committed in the PPE procurement system.