When officials from a little-known body called the National Investigation Service (Natis) arrived at Tony Cox’s home in 2019, the then-Conservative councillor (now a member of Reform UK and deputy mayor of Southend-on-Sea) says he was told to come with them.
Cox had been accused by a whistleblower of taking a £1,050 bribe, and Natis had been contracted by Southend council between 2013 and 2019 to help tackle fraud. After Natis’s investigators insisted Cox accompany them, he was, in his words, “falsely imprisoned”. The Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case against him in 2019, and Natis settled with him in 2022 (apart from an apology, the details of the settlement can’t be disclosed under the terms of their agreement).
The episode raised questions not only about the investigation into Cox, but about Natis itself and how it was managed. The unit—run out of Thurrock Council’s fraud department since 2017, and contracted by the Department for Business and Trade to investigate fraud relating to Covid-19 business grants—had gradually expanded into a hybrid law enforcement body under the Proceeds of Crime Act (Poca).
Yet, according to an independent investigation into Natis, which reported in March 2024 and was released under FOI, though some Natis staff members were meant to have been given investigatory powers under Poca, this had not been systematically arranged. According to the report commissioned by Thurrock Council and conducted by Mazars LLP (now Forvis Mazars), only three out of 108 Natis members of staff had proper secondment agreements enabling them to investigate fraud under Poca.
The Times reported in 2024 that the governance arrangements for most Natis staff were inadequate. They did not have the requisite investigation powers “beyond those of trading standards staff”. And Natis “issued staff with police-style uniforms and warrant cards and until recently had a website with a ‘.police’ email domain,” the Times said. In response, Thurrock told the Covert Councillor that the Mazars report “says that the risk that any court would dismiss the use of POCA powers was low. The report is also clear that all secondments were retrospectively formalised by the time it was published.”
In May 2024, following the Times’s reporting, the College of Policing told Thurrock that Natis’s “usage of the natis.police.uk domain name should cease as soon as practicably possible”, according to the newspaper. (Regarding this, Thurrock stated that: “There was no request from the College of Policing that Natis stop using the police.uk domain or suggestion that they had issued the domain in error. Instead, Natis stopped using it as a web address early 2024 to reflect the position of Natis as a service of Thurrock council and worked with the College of Policing to transition staff emails. The email transition was completed later that year. Correct process and procedures were followed when the domain was requested and granted.”)
Mazars also concluded that Natis’s “presentation of itself may be perceived as misrepresentation”, because it “operated as if it is a separate entity” to Thurrock council when it wasn’t. A review of Natis accounts also found “evidence of financial mismanagement”, Mazars said. Southend-on-Sea has since commissioned an independent investigation into Natis’s activity while it was contracted to undertake counter-fraud work for the council.
Whether it was the press reporting on Natis, or the fact that its record in catching fraudsters was poor, last year the government’s Insolvency Service announced it would take over Natis’s cases, only two months after renewing a contract with the unit. But Thurrock Council confirmed to the Covert Councillor that Natis still has an active caseload of 130 investigations, with a suspected “fraud value” of £50m. The council said the transfer to the Insolvency Service was in process.
The Natis story has another twist. The department which investigated others, chiefly for Covid-related fraud, failed to spot serious misconduct in Thurrock council itself. Investigations into Sean Clark, the authority’s former Section 151 officer (the person responsible for administering a council’s financial affairs) revealed he oversaw borrowing six times the size of the council’s annual budget, which ultimately led it to declare bankruptcy in December 2022. The case is now under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office. Businessman Liam Kavanagh had secured a £655m investment from Thurrock into his solar farm business and spent millions on luxury goods, including a yacht and private jet. Clark was sanctioned by the Financial Reporting Council after admitting misconduct, while Kavanagh’s lawyers have said that he was entitled to spend the council money on whatever he wanted.
After last year’s local elections, in which Reform won control of 10 councils, the party made supposed waste, fraud and corruption in local government a focus of its rhetoric. Zia Yusuf, the party’s former head of policy, said at the time that “waste and in some cases corruption” in local councils “is off the charts and a reckoning is coming.” He announced Reform’s Elon Musk-style Doge audits in response.
Scandals are certainly not new to local government. In the 1980s, Westminster City Council became engulfed in one of the most infamous episodes in British municipal politics. The Conservative-run authority was accused of selling council homes in marginal wards on the assumption that Conservative voters would buy them—the so-called “Homes for Votes” affair.
After a BBC investigation exposed the policy, a district auditor ruled it illegal. Council leader Shirley Porter and her deputy David Weeks were accused of “improper gerrymandering” and “wilful misconduct”. What followed was a decade-long legal saga in the courts. The late Porter and Weeks were eventually fined around £36m, though they later settled for less.
More recently there have been smaller-scale, but still troubling, incidents. In Tower Hamlets last year, a strip club owner took the council to the High Court after his application to continue operating was rejected. The owner claimed a councillor had demanded thousands of pounds in return for supporting the application. The council eventually settled the case and paid damages. An internal investigation found evidence of wrongdoing, though it did not directly link this to councillors. (Tower Hamlets Council has not responded to repeated requests for comment).
In Bolton, former council worker Richard Shaw was convicted of defrauding vulnerable residents that he was employed to protect out of £900,000, which he spent on luxury vehicles and a property in Ribble Valley. A former employee of Birmingham City Council forged invoices, replacing the council’s bank details with his own. Bryn Howells was found guilty of fraud for juggling multiple council jobs.
Tenancy fraud—where social housing is illegally sublet, obtained through false documents or used for commercial purposes—is common too. In London, where social housing is scarce, the incentive to cheat the system can be particularly strong. Hillingdon Council recovered 112 council properties let in fraudulent circumstances over a twelve-month period, saving the authority £7.8m and freeing homes for families on the waiting list. Croydon recovered 36 homes in 2025, saving £2.8m.
In Barking and Dagenham, investigators are currently examining what one Labour councillor has described as a potential case of “mass-scale organised fraud” involving council housing. Hundreds of properties may have been allocated fraudulently, including cases where homes were allegedly rented out on Airbnb or obtained using fake documents. Six arrests have been made, though no charges have yet been brought.
Blue Badge scheme misuse, procurement fraud and payroll fraud are also common. No one knows precisely how widespread these are, but auditors calculate that fraud cost local government £8.8bn between 2021 and 2022. Government estimates suggest that fraud across the entire public sector could cost as much as £81bn a year, but that figure includes everything from benefit fraud to tax evasion; local government represents only part of the total.
And what of Reform’s Doge? Last month, Reform announced an “SAS squad of experts” to find further savings in Reform-controlled councils, and claimed the party had found £700m of savings in its first year. But let’s not forget that, last July, the party claimed it had uncovered £2,832,520 of fraud at Kent County Council—an amount that had already been reported in 2024 by Kent County Council’s Governance and Audit Committee.
