Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many Carer’s Allowance overpayments have been referred to HM Courts and Tribunals Service since February 2022.
Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
Since February 2022, there have been 119 cases accepted for prosecution for benefit fraud that were so serious they met the threshold for prosecution by The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) where Carer’s Allowance was the primary overpayment.
Note that this this figure only represents those cases accepted by CPS and does not indicate prosecution outcome. Data is for the period 1/2/2022 to 17/4/2024.
The data has been sourced from internal DWP management information, which is intended only to help the Department to manage its business. It is not intended for publication and has not been subject to the same quality assurance checks applied to our published official statistics.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many Carer’s Allowance cases were flagged as potentially in need of investigation by the VEPs system in the 2023-24 financial year; and of these, how many (a) were and (b) were not investigated.
Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
The information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the total value was of underpayments of the Personal Independence Payment due to recipients’ failure to update their medical need in the 2022-2023 financial year.
Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
DWP measures its underpayments via annual national statistics published each May. However, we do not produce an estimate for the average value of a benefit underpayment.
Our estimates relating to PIP underpayments in 2022-23 can be found at the link below:
Fraud and error in the benefit system: financial year 2022 to 2023 estimates - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
Table 6 provides the total estimated value of PIP underpayments in 2022-23.
Table 8 provides the estimated value of PIP underpayments due to claimant error. All claimant error underpayments were due to errors where the claimant’s condition had got worse, and they failed to inform the department (Functional Needs).
Asked by: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average value was of an underpayment of the Personal Independence Payment in the 2022-2023 financial year.
Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
DWP measures its underpayments via annual national statistics published each May. However, we do not produce an estimate for the average value of a benefit underpayment.
Our estimates relating to PIP underpayments in 2022-23 can be found at the link below:
Fraud and error in the benefit system: financial year 2022 to 2023 estimates - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
Table 6 provides the total estimated value of PIP underpayments in 2022-23.
Table 8 provides the estimated value of PIP underpayments due to claimant error. All claimant error underpayments were due to errors where the claimant’s condition had got worse, and they failed to inform the department (Functional Needs).
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to paragraph 3.18 of the National Audit Office report entitled Investigation into overpayments of Carer’s Allowance, published on 26 April 2019, what changes were made to the business rules of the Verify Earnings and Pensions Service that revised downwards the number of alerts that were forecast to be generated from 380,000 to 75,000.
Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
A review of rules has provided a streamlined approach to the identification of VEP rules, enabling alignment with the latest HMRC data that feeds into DWP Real Time Earnings (RTE) system.
Examples of improvements include benefit specific rules, such as details of fluctuations in income, one off payments and irregular payments revision.
The Department is constantly reviewing available resources against priorities.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what options are available to those people who have been placed in temporary accommodation in a different Council area and therefore do not meet either Councils' criteria for accessing the Household Support Fund.
Answered by Jo Churchill - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The Household Support Fund is an intentionally flexible scheme, designed to enable Local Authorities to deliver a tailored response to local need as they have the ties and knowledge to best determine how this support should be provided.
Local Authorities have the flexibility to design and deliver their Household Support Fund scheme through a variety of routes, including, for example, offering vouchers to households, directly providing food, or issuing grants to third parties. This means that it is for each local council to decide how, where and when they distribute their funding within the parameters of the guidance and grant determination set out for them by the Department for Work and Pensions.
Local Authorities are encouraged through our guidance to work together with neighbouring Authorities to help prevent double provision and/or no provision, especially where the allocation of provision may take place in one area, but the award recipient has a residential address in another.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people received fines for overpayment of Carer's Allowance in (a) 2020, (b) 2021, (c) 2022, (d) 2023 and (e) as of 1 April 2024; and what was the total amount of these fines.
Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
Claimants have a responsibility to ensure they are entitled to benefits they claim and to inform the DWP of any changes in their circumstances that could impact their award.
Overpayments occur when an individual receives a payment they are not entitled to. The fines imposed by DWP for overpayments vary depending on the circumstances of the overpayment.
Administrative Penalties may be offered by the fraud investigator as an alternative to a prosecution in certain cases where there has been benefit fraud or attempted benefit fraud.
The table below provides the volume and value of Administrative Penalties accepted due to an overpayment of Carer’s Allowance, by financial year.
Financial Years | Volume of Administrative Penalties | Value |
2020/21 | 64 | £114.4k |
2021/22 | 43 | £80.2k |
2022/23 | 43 | £81.3k |
2023/24 | 75 | £140.8k |
For cases of claimant error, a £50 Civil Penalty may be imposed by DWP where an individual incurs an overpayment as a result of failing to provide accurate information and have not taken reasonable steps to correct the error.
The table below provides the volume and value of Civil Penalties given due to an overpayment of Carer’s Allowance, by financial year.
Financial Years | Volume of Civil Penalties | Value |
2020/21 | 14.9k | £0.747m |
2021/22 | 26.3k | £1.309m |
2022/23 | 24.8k | £1.241m |
2023/24 | 30.1k | £1.506m |
Note that our latest figures show there are approximately 1.4 million people claiming Carer’s Allowance.
The data provided for this response is for the volume of penalties, and it is important to note that individuals can receive more than one penalty.
Data been sourced from internal DWP management information, which is intended only to help the Department to manage its business. It is not intended for publication and has not been subject to the same quality assurance checks applied to our published official statistics. Our analysis has not captured a small but unknown number of penalties that are logged as debts in their own right on the debt MI system. Our understanding is that this approach is rarely used for Carer’s Allowance.
More information about DWP penalties policy can be found here: Penalties policy: in respect of social security fraud and error - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
Asked by: Mark Hendrick (Labour (Co-op) - Preston)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people in (a) Preston, (b) Lancashire and (c) England have (i) applied for and (ii) received Personal Independence Payments for inflammatory bowel disease in each year since 2020.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The latest available data on personal independence payment (PIP) clearances and awards can be found here. The requested data can be found on the ‘PIP Clearances’ dataset by going to ‘Geography’, ‘National – Regional – LAs – OAs’ and following the drop downs to the relevant areas. Similarly, you can filter for those with inflammatory bowel disease through ‘Disability’, ‘Gastrointestinal disease’ and selecting ‘Inflammatory bowel disease’. To further filter just for those awarded, you can go to ‘Clearance Type Detail’ and select ‘Awarded’.
A lookup which shows which Local Authorities are in Lancashire is available here.
Data is based on primary disabling condition as recorded on the PIP computer systems. Claimants may often have multiple disabling conditions upon which the decision is based but only the primary condition is shown in these statistics.
Guidance on how to use Stat-Xplore can be found here. An account is not required to use Stat- Xplore, the ‘Guest Login’ feature gives instant access to the main functions.
Asked by: Martyn Day (Scottish National Party - Linlithgow and East Falkirk)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of waiting times to speak to the Disability Service Centre.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
Telephony is our customers’ primary channel to contact us. We continually assess the number of calls we are receiving and the associated waiting times, deploying resources accordingly to support service levels wherever this is possible.
However, due to recent higher volumes of calls than forecast, from the 24th of April and throughout May, we are deploying dedicated telephony specific resource to the Personal Independent Payment telephony lines which will give better support when dealing with sudden increases in traffic.
Asked by: Jonathan Gullis (Conservative - Stoke-on-Trent North)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what (a) restrictions and (b) guidance are in place for landlords renting out properties to immediate family members and receiving (i) housing benefit and (ii) universal credit for that property.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
To be eligible for support with housing costs in Housing Benefit and Universal Credit, claimants must be liable for making payment of rent on a commercial basis. A claimant can receive support with housing costs if that test is satisfied and liability is to a close relative, but only where that relative does not live in the same property as the claimant.
Guidance setting this out is available on Gov.uk.