The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is forcing hundreds of thousands of people to repay benefits after errors the department itself had made.
Under the current rules, the benefits department recovers benefits overpayments by deducting an amount from a claimant’s monthly benefit payment. The department usually sends notice of this, and a claimant can appeal. However, the deductions will start at their next payment regardless.
In a National Audit Office (NAO) report, the DWP estimated that it overpaid 6.7% – or £9.5billion – of benefit expenditure in 2023-24. That’s up from £8.2billion in the previous year. This is broken down into three categories which include fraud, claimant error, and “official error” – this was where a benefit was paid incorrectly due to action, delay or mistaken assessment by the DWP.
According to research from the Public Law Project (Public Law Project), in the same year, the DWP raised 686,756 cases of Universal Credit overpayment debts and identified them as “official error.” Under DWP rules, all overpayments must be clawed back – even if it was the department’s mistake.
Alongside 30 other leading charities, The Public Law Project has now written to Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall calling for an end to this issue.
The letter urges the DWP to change its approach to Universal Credit overpayments, and instead line more with that of Housing Benefit. With this, overpayments are not recovered when the claimant could not reasonably have expected to have known they had been overpaid.
The legal charity has helped dozens of claimants with official error debt. One claimant saw their debt of £8,600 in Universal Credit waived after winning a High Court Battle with the DWP. If a mistake does occur on the DWP’s end, the claimants often does not question the rate – although they can be reassured by the department when they do. This can sometimes lead to overpayments occurring for years, leading to debt bills worth thousands of pounds.
Shameem Ahmad, chief executive officer of PLP, said: “No one is expecting the DWP not to make mistakes. However, it is incumbent on the department to take responsibility for those mistakes, rather than pushing that burden onto people it should in fact be supporting.
“These official payment errors have real and highly detrimental consequences for people – causing sudden financial pressures and anxieties, through no fault of their own. This is the government’s chance to ensure it does not plunge hundreds of thousands of more people into debt, go some way in restoring public trust, and ultimately incentivise the DWP to not make errors in the first place.”
The benefits department disputed the figures released by the Public Law Project, stating that it no longer records whether a debt repayment has arisen from an official error. The DWP recorded “official error” in its 2023-24 annual accounts.
On the issue, a DWP spokesperson said: “Overpayment by official error accounts for just 0.3% of our overall benefits spend, and we always work with people who have been overpaid to ensure repayments are affordable. We have an obligation to protect public funds and to ensure money lost to fraud and error is recovered, which is why we are bringing forward the biggest fraud crackdown in a generation, saving the taxpayer £1.5 billion over the next five years.”
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