Bill for overpaid benefits up a third to more than £300m

TAXPAYERS lost more than £300million last year when claimants were overpaid benefits.

In 2021/22, some £294,707,000 was written off after being mistakenly paid to claimants, while a futher £15,175,000 was paid to claimants who had died. It means that every single weekday, more than £1million was wrongly handed out and cannot be retrieved.

The annual total of “non-recoverable benefit overpayments” was up a third on the previous year’s figure of £221,628,000.

The figures, in this week’s annual report of the Department of Work and Pensions, will be an embarrassment to Therese Coffey, the work and pensions secretary, who is running Liz Truss’s Conservative leadership campaign.

The report said: “During the year we write off non-recoverable overpayments of benefit.

“These are where we can’t legally enforce repayment or it’s not in the public interest to do so.”

Elliot Keck, investigations campaign manager at the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said yesterday: “While taxpayers are minding every penny, the welfare system is writing off millions of pounds.

“Britons will be furious to hear government is losing increasingly vast sums on benefit overpayments.

“Given the levels of fraud in the system after the chaos of Covid, ministers must act urgently to get these overpayments under control.”

A further £5.4million of fraudulent claims were written off because the department had exhausted its debt recovery processes, up from a total of £5,206,000 in 2020/21 to £5,357,000 last year.

Consolatory payments, ex-gratia sums to awarded claimants in order to “restore confidence and relieve anxiety as a result of departmental failure or delay”, amounted to £597,000 – down slightly from the £606,000 paid out the previous year.

The report noted: “Budgeting and crisis loans which can’t be recovered are written off subject to strict criteria.

“This year we wrote off 21,319 of these loans with a total value of £2.7 million.

“We also wrote off 24,046 irrecoverable overpayments amounting to £3.06million, of which £2.95million relate to winter fuel payments.

This year the department also wrote off historic non-recoverable cold weather payments amounting to £0.2 million.”