Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the highest value overpayment has been for Carer’s Allowance in the (a) 2021-22, (b) 2022-23 and (c) 2023-24 financial years.

Claimants have a responsibility to ensure they are entitled to benefits they claim and to inform the DWP of any changes in their circumstances that could impact their award.

Where overpayments do occur due to not being entitled to the benefit, the Department has a duty to the taxpayer to protect public funds and to ask for money to be paid back. We remain committed to working with anyone who is struggling with their repayment terms and will always look to negotiate sustainable and affordable repayment plans.

Our most recent statistics show that Carer's Allowance overpayments relating to earnings/employment represents just 2.1% of our £3.3bn Carer’s Allowance expenditure.

The information requested has been provided in the table below. To avoid potentially disclosing personal information, we have bucketed the values requested.

The data has been sourced from internal DWP management information, which is intended only to help the Department to manage its business. It is not intended for publication and has not been subject to the same quality assurance checks applied to our published official statistics.

Note that the values represent the original overpayment amount when raised on Debt Manager. As the year relates to when the overpayment was raised as a debt for recovery, it does not necessarily relate to the period as to when benefit was overpaid. The overpayments above all span periods of many years.

Note that the data provided is for all categories of overpayment. It is not necessarily the case that these overpayments arose due to claimants breaching the earnings limit.