Wednesday November 19th 2025
City of Edinburgh Council offices
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Joe Sullivan
Council staff detected almost £1.4 million worth of fraud in the past year – including from council rates evasion and misuse of blue badge placards.
A report at the council’s finance committee on Tuesday said £978,659 of the total was from cases where people wrongfully applied for or held a single occupancy council tax discount.
It detailed that council officers found the unpaid rates through a combination of data held by the council and third party sources, as well as ‘specialist validation services’.
The report also says efforts to recover the fraud detailed in the report was underway.
Some £106,026 came from other council tax exemptions and discounts that were wrongfully claimed or held, including student discounts, while £57,438 came from undue tax reductions.
And £144,000 worth of fraud was detected from eight cases of illegal subletting of council properties.
The council report explains that some categories of fraud are difficult to put exact values on, and so estimates are used.
Outside of housing, the largest source of fraud was involving disabled blue badges, where ‘misuse’ of blue badge placards was valued at £53,470.
The council also found that £13,140 in Scottish Welfare Fund payments, meant for those on benefits close to needing to enter care or who face ‘exceptional’ living pressures, had wrongfully been disbursed.
And £3,354 had been detected by the council for situations where people on benefits failed to notify the government of a change in circumstances, which meant they were overpaid.
Besides providing the data on the value of the fraud, the report also discussed a national anti-fraud initiative that has been running since 2024.
It said nine cases of fraud had been detected from improperly claimed Small Business Bonus Scheme payments, as well as six cases of erroneous payment.
It also detailed that 420 cases of fraud had been directly reported to the council recently, with 402 being in the council’s remit.
Among the total, some 245 cases of benefit or council tax fraud had been reported, as well as 110 cases of ‘tenancy or other housing’ fraud.
Another 17 allegations were made for licensing, landlord or HMO issues, two were made for non-domestic rates, 11 were made for blue badges and parking and 13 were for miscellaneous allegations.
The report also detailed that allegations of fraud had been made against four staff members.
It did not detail what time period the 420 reports had originated from, or what the outcomes of the reported instances of fraud were.
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