Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many and what proportion of universal credit claims were found to be inaccurate since April 2020; and in how many of those cases (a) recovery action has been initiated and (b) an overpayment has been identified.

Our annual Monetary Value of Fraud and Error Estimates 2020/21 (table 5) published May 2021, provide information on the proportion of Universal Credit cases overpaid:

Fraud and error in the benefit system: financial year 2020 to 2021 estimates - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

It should be noted that many will only have a very small overpayment, as the measurement doesn’t distinguish between a very small overpayment and a whole award error, which is considerably rarer. The biggest area of loss from these overpayments is fraud, which includes cases where people exploited our suspension of face-to-face identification checks at the start of the pandemic.

Since April 2020, DWP has referred over one million Universal Credit overpayments for recovery, of which 694k have led to a recovery of money.