Universal Credit

(asked on 24th June 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the oral evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee of the Change Director General and Senior Responsible Owner for universal credit, on 24 November 2021, Q34, HC728, how many cases of the 90,000 estimated as not correct have been identified through reverification as not correct; and in how many of those cases has mandatory reconsideration been applied for.


Answered by
David Rutley Portrait
David Rutley
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
This question was answered on 4th July 2022

In March 2020 the Department introduced a temporary verification easement to Universal Credit claims to support people during the height of the pandemic. This easement meant the Department successfully paid an additional 2.4 million claims during the early months of the pandemic.

We reported last year on how we were reviewing cases paid under these temporary verification easements, known as “Trust and Protect”, and were re-applying these specific checks. The number of cases where evidence has been reviewed under this process has now risen from the figure of 900,000 previously reported to 1.1 million.

Of that number, 125,000 cases have been found to have an element of incorrectness that has affected the original entitlement decision. Decisions made as a result of this exercise have generated c14,500 (12%) Mandatory Reconsideration requests. (This data is based on internal and emerging internal management information and therefore has not been subject to the same degree of scrutiny and quality assurance as an official statistic.)

The learning from this work is informing the new Targeted Case Review exercise announced in the ‘Fighting Fraud in the Welfare System’ plan (published May 2022) which will review over 2 million UC claims over the next 5 years.

Reticulating Splines