Over the weekend, the text of the speech David Miliband would have given had he won the Labour leadership election made its way into the Guardian.

Since Mr Miliband never made the speech, perhaps it is unfair to give it the Full Fact treatment.

However one claim David Miliband would have made chimes in with a speech to be given by Ed Miliband later today, regarding Labour's record on welfare and benefits.

The former Foreign Secretary would have said: “We know it is wrong to play games with the welfare state; that is why we cut in half the level of benefit fraud we inherited from the Tories”.

However this claim is subject ot some significant caveats.

When we looked at an almost identical claim made by Labour peer Lord Knight last year, we found it didn't tell the full story on the declining cost of benefit fraud

Though figures showed that between 2002 and 2009/10 the cost of benefit fraud came down from around £2 billion to £1 billion, (or 1.9 per cent of the benefit bill to 0.7 per cent), this wasn't a completely fair comparison,

In 2004, the Department changed the methodology by which benefit fraud and error was calculated, with a view to improving the accuracy from a £0.5 billion margin of error to £0.1 billion.

As part of this review, it was decided that fraud in the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) would no longer be included in the Department’s measures due to complexities in assessing individual circumstances.

Given that DLA fraud and error accounted for £0.7 billion of the total benefit overpayments in 2003/04, this represents a significant part of the reduction in the welfare fraud and error seen in 2005.

When we investigated last year, the National Audit Office (NAO), who audit the figures, told us: “There has been a reduction over the past decade, but comparisons shouldn’t be made between the two data sets; it’s not comparing like with like.”

Looking specifically at the years covered by the new methodology, NAO data reveals that there has actually been a slight rise in benefit fraud since 2005, moving from 0.6 per cent of the welfare bill in that year to 0.8 per cent in 2009, and a projected 0.7 per cent in 2010.

So on the strength of this, it would not be completely fair to claim that Labour halved the amount of fraud in the benefits system.

We will be watching to see if the claim makes it into the speech that actually does get made by the junior Miliband this afternoon.