Thousands of motorists who took part in seven experiments to avoid rush-hour driving have wrongly been given government cash, the AD says on Wednesday.

In total, 4,200 out of 79,000 people have had their monthly payment cancelled because they had moved, were on maternity leave or no longer took the roads required by the trials, the AD says.

The amounts they were paid ranged from a few euros to up to €140 a month.

The organisers of the experiments have refused to describe the wrongful payments as fraud or deliberate, but Labour MP Duco Hoogland says those who got the cash without meeting the requirements should be punished.

Not deliberate

‘People will always abuse projects like this, but most of them are not deliberately committing fraud,’ Gelderland province spokeswoman Petra Borsboom told the paper.

However, the cash will not be clawed back because it would not be cost effective, Borsboom said.

The project ‘Beating the Jams’ on the A2 motorway between Best West and Boxtel was based on an app and was the only experiment where no fraud was recorded.

The biggest ‘drop out’ rate was on a project to avoid the rush hour on parts of the A12, A15, A50, A73 and A325, where 9% of the 20,000 participants were removed from the scheme.