Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Work and Pensions – in the House of Commons at 2:30 pm on 29 June 2009.
Jim Knight
Minister of State (the South West), Regional Affairs, Minister of State (the South West), Department for Work and Pensions, Minister of State (Regional Affairs) (South West), The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions
2:30,
29 June 2009
Naturally, we take any incident of fraud extremely seriously. We have robust systems in place to discover incidents of fraud, as has happened in the Majority of cases that are being reported. One provider was highlighted by The Observer yesterday, and I am aware of another. To my knowledge, there is no evidence of any systematic fraud on the part of those providers. Indeed, the private sector providers have got 250,000 people into work. Those are individuals with whom Jobcentre Plus has been working for a considerable period and has not managed to get into work, but thanks to payment by results, we are getting good results from the private sector providers.
The term "majority" is used in two ways in Parliament. Firstly a Government cannot operate effectively unless it can command a majority in the House of Commons - a majority means winning more than 50% of the votes in a division. Should a Government fail to hold the confidence of the House, it has to hold a General Election. Secondly the term can also be used in an election, where it refers to the margin which the candidate with the most votes has over the candidate coming second. To win a seat a candidate need only have a majority of 1.