£44m bonus pot for civil servants who run benefits department

BUREAUCRATS at the Department for Work and Pensions have pocketed £44million in bonuses while presiding over huge fraud and errors in welfare benefits.

The civil servants were rewarded with ‘good performance’ payments that are handed out for saving money, hitting targets for promoting diversity or improving health and safety.

A total of 240 senior officials shared £760,000, averaging £8,000 each. Some 88,300 junior staff took home an extra £1,750. This came on top of their salaries and generous gold-plated pensions.

Yet the DWP has presided over fraud and error in the benefits system that cost the taxpayer £2.4billion last year.

Overpayments in handouts including Income Support, Jobseekers Allowance, Housing Benefit and Pension Credit totalled £3.5billion in 2016-17, of which only £1.1billion was clawed back.

Tens of thousands of people were also forced to wait six weeks to receive the first payments of Universal Credit.

Ministers were warned that reports of hardship caused to many tenants by the wait risked turning the flagship welfare policy into a new poll tax – prompting changes by Chancellor Philip Hammond in last month’s Budget.

Whitehall accounts show civil servants were paid £108million in bonuses last year. One unnamed bureaucrat at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport got £30,000 – more than the average UK salary of £27,600.

Ministry of Defence penpushers pocketed £19.6million in performance-related pay. Senior staff shared £378,000, with payouts averaging almost £9,000, while juniors received end-of-year bonuses of up to £4,500. At the same time, military chiefs say the Armed Forces face such crippling cuts they might no longer be able to protect the nation.

Bonuses at the Ministry of Justice totalled £7.8million for officials who have overseen one of the most violent years in a jail system awash with drugs and smuggled mobile phones.

Staff at the Department of Transport collected £5.7million in payments despite the controversy over the £52billion HS2 railway.

James Price of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: ‘Performancerelated pay is preferable to automatic year- on- year increases, but the country cannot afford bonuses on this scale. Hard-pressed taxpayers are struggling under a 30-year high tax burden, so it is unacceptable that Whitehall departments are padding their staff’s bank accounts with taxpayers’ money.’

A Cabinet Office spokesman said performance-related payments were necessary to ‘attract, retain and motivate highly-skilled individuals’ but added that they had been cut by 24 per cent since 2010-11.