Convicted Fraudster Handed Cabinet Role, Then Swiftly Relieved of Fraud Brief in Andy Burnham’s Chaotic Reshuffle

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Louise Haigh, who admitted committing fraud against the police in 2014, has been stripped of oversight for tackling fraud in the public sector, just hours after being appointed to Andy Burnham’s top team as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

The embarrassing climbdown, confirmed on Tuesday, sees responsibility for the Public Sector Fraud Authority (PSFA), the body tasked with rooting out scams involving taxpayers’ money, transferred to Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary. It had briefly sat with Ms Haigh as part of the wider Cabinet Office brief she inherited on Monday.

Labour insists the timing is entirely coincidental. A Cabinet Office spokesman claimed the decision to move the PSFA out of the Cabinet Office was taken before Ms Haigh’s appointment was even confirmed, and had nothing whatsoever to do with her fraud conviction, adding that “claiming otherwise is completely inaccurate.” Voters, however, may be forgiven for finding the sequence of events rather difficult to swallow.

A Fraud Conviction Labour Would Rather Forget

Ms Haigh’s past is not in dispute. In 2014, roughly six months before entering Parliament, she pleaded guilty to making a false report to police, admitting she had lied about her work phone being stolen during a night out in 2013, when in fact she had left it at home. Magistrates handed her a conditional discharge. That conviction, though now legally “spent,” has followed her through Westminster and cost her a Cabinet job once already.

Ms Haigh was forced to quit as Transport Secretary in November 2024 after the historic conviction came to light, a saga made worse by her claim that she had told Sir Keir Starmer about it back in 2020, when he first promoted her to the shadow cabinet. In her resignation letter, she said only that she was “sorry to leave under these circumstances.”

Fast forward to this week, and Andy Burnham has apparently decided a fraud conviction is no obstacle to high office after all, restoring Ms Haigh to the Cabinet as First Secretary of State and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a role that, remarkably, still leaves her responsible for propriety and ethics across government, even as fraud oversight is quietly taken away.

A Wider Reshuffle Dressed Up as “Slimming Down”

The PSFA switch was announced alongside a broader restructuring of the Cabinet Office, with Labour ministers keen to frame it as an efficiency drive rather than damage control. Under the changes, taking effect from Tuesday where possible, the Office for Equality and Opportunity moves to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Office for Impact Economy and digital identity policy shifts to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and the Investment Security Unit heads to the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade. The PSFA itself moves to the Department for Work and Pensions, though the Treasury retains a central sponsorship role.

Officials insist most fraud casework already happens within the DWP, making the move a matter of practical sense rather than political cover. Given Labour’s track record on transparency, that explanation is likely to receive a healthy dose of scepticism.

A Pattern of Poor Judgement

Whatever the official line, the optics are damning for a Labour government that promised the “highest standards” in public life. Handing a convicted fraudster a senior Cabinet post, only to yank away the one brief that would have looked most absurd in her hands, speaks volumes about the party’s priorities and its instinct for damage limitation over principle.

It is a pattern that has become depressingly familiar under Labour: political loyalty and factional convenience taking precedence over judgement, while the British public are left to wonder who, exactly, is minding the shop.

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