Social Security Benefits
(asked on 24th June 2019) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 24 Jun 2019 to Question 264329, of the 749,000 claimants with deductions from universal credit for non-universal credit debts, how much debt remains outstanding for each benefit in the Prescribed Social Security Benefits / Payments category.
The table below shows the outstanding debt balances for the 749k Debtors with recovery from UC for non-UC debts.*
Benefit | Current Debt Balance |
Attendance Allowance | £0.022m |
Administrative Penalty | £0.011m |
Bereavement Allowance | £0.038m |
Bereavement Benefit | £0.001m |
Bereavement Support Payment | £0.005m |
Carer’s Allowance | £18.290m |
Civil Penalties | £0.099m |
Disability Living Allowance | £6.934m |
Disability Working Allowance | £0.004m |
Employment and Support Allowance | £39.226m |
Family Credit | £0.097m |
Housing Benefit | £94.378m |
Incapacity Benefit | £6.371m |
Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit | £0.027m |
Income Support | £120.712m |
Invalidity Benefit | £0.080m |
Job Seekers Allowance | £22.745m |
Maternity Allowance | £0.096m |
Pension Credit | £0.568m |
Personal Independence Payments | £1.262m |
Reduced Earnings Allowance | £0.006m |
Retirement Pension | £0.126m |
Sickness Benefit | £0.002m |
Severe Disablement Allowance | £0.259m |
Social Fund Loans | £73.925m |
Social Fund Overpayments | £0.619m |
Non UC Short Term Advances | £0.293m |
Supplementary Benefit | £0.113m |
Tax Credit Overpayment | £635.113m |
Unemployment Benefit | £0.020m |
Widows Benefit | £0.045m |
Widowed Mother Allowance | £0.418m |
Widows Pension | £0.125m |
Widowed Parent’s Allowance | £1.491m |
The Department works hard to prevent potential benefit overpayments from occurring. Internal and external data matches are increasingly helping inform benefit payments and alerting staff to check for any undeclared changes in people’s circumstances in real time.
Where overpayments do occur, the Department ensures that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect claimants who are subject to deductions to repay these overpayments.
It is not intended that the recovery of an overpayment should cause any claimant undue financial hardship.
*The data provided in this response has been sourced from internal management information and was not intended for public release. It should therefore not be compared to any other, similar data subsequently released by the Department. All figures have been rounded to the nearest thousand.