Call for transfer of unclaimed benefits
AN SNP MP has called for bi l l ion s of pounds of unclaimed benefits payments to go to the Scottish Government.
Dr Paul Monaghan, the new MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, suggested welfare cash and pension entitlements not claimed by Scots should go to the SNP administration in Edinburgh.
The latest figures, from 2010, show that across the UK between £7.5 billion and £12.3bn in benefits payments went unclaimed. The figure for Pension Credits was between £1.9bn and £2.8bn.
Dr Monaghan, a director of the Highland Homeless Trust, used a parliamentary question to ask Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith for take-up rates among Scots and if he would “take steps to transfer the value of unclaimed benefits and pension entitlements to the Scottish Government”.
Re sp ond i ng f or t he Government, Priti Patel, the Tory employment minister, said the UK Government had no regional breakdown of the sums involved.
She said: “Estimates of benefit take-up are not available at geographies below Great Britain.”
The Conservative Government says its new Universal Credit system should reduce the amount of unclaimed benefits.
Age UK estimates among older people alone, up to £5.5bn of benefits are unclaimed each year. At the same time around 1.6 million people in later life live in poverty.