A crackdown on child benefit claimants who have moved abroad will save taxpayers £350m in the next five years, the government has said.
A Cabinet Office team will track the travel data of benefit claimants and target those who have left the country and are no longer entitled to payments.
It comes after a pilot of the scheme saw 15 investigators strip payments from 2,600 claimants who had left Britain but were still receiving child benefit.
The pilot saved taxpayers £17m, and officials said a full rollout of the scheme will bring savings to £350m.
It will see a team of 200 investigators examining benefit eligibility in what the government vowed will be “a clear warning to those trying to scam the system”.
Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould said: “This government is putting a stop to people claiming benefits when they aren’t eligible to do so.
“From September, we’ll have ten times as many investigators saving hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money.
“If you’re claiming benefits you’re not entitled to, your time is up.”
The savings will add to pressure from Labour backbenchers for the government to scrap the two-child cap on child benefit, which stops parents from claiming benefits for any third or subsequent child born after April 2017 and has been linked to rising levels of child poverty.
Child benefit is one of the most widely claimed welfare payments and is given to 6.9 million families across the UK, supporting 11.9 million children.
Those outside the UK for more than eight weeks, barring exceptional circumstances, are no longer allowed to claim child benefit, with claimants expected to inform HMRC upon leaving the country.
The crackdown will see child benefit records checked against the international travel data of claimants, with cases of those who have left the country being referred to investigators to uncover wrongful payments.
The rollout comes ahead of a child poverty strategy due to be published by Sir Keir Starmer and education secretary Bridget Phillipson this autumn, in which MPs have called for the ending the Osborne-era two-child cap to be a priority.
It was originally due to be published in the spring, but was pushed back to coincide with Rachel Reeves’s second Budget, expected in November.
The two-child benefit cap was introduced when the Conservatives were in power, and critics say getting rid of it would be the most effective way of reducing child poverty across the UK.
Sir Keir has left the door open to scrapping the cap, but has warned that lifting the limit would not be a “silver bullet” in the fight against child poverty.
