A new report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) suggests that fraud and error levels in benefits spending at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is ‘unacceptably high’ and said that more must be done to get a grip on the billions of pounds being lost every year. The watchdog discovered that DWP overpaid an “eye-watering” £8.6 billion across benefits in 2021-22, with £6.5 billion of that figure due to fraud.
Meanwhile, problems with benefit underpayments can lead to severe hardship. The DWP estimates that 237,000 older people have been underpaid a total of £1.46 billion in State Pension, with underpayments going back as far as 1985.
The PAC report said that efforts to correct the systemic underpayment of the State Pension are too slow to meaningfully put things right and will be “too little, too late” for many affected pensioners.
