Underpayment of Benefits: Compensation Debate
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Clive Efford
Main Page: Clive Efford (Labour - Eltham)Department Debates - View all Clive Efford's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
Underpayment of Benefits: Compensation
Clive Efford Excerpts(2 years, 3 months ago)
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David Rutley
My hon. Friend has made a good point. There are people who criticise universal credit, but, as I said earlier, it is a simplifying mechanism. It proved to be very resilient in response to the pandemic, and it helped millions of people at a crucial time. We have learnt lessons in that regard, but, as we have said before and as I have reiterated today, there are wider lessons that we also need to learn, and we will do so.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
I wish to pay tribute to Greenwich Borough Council’s welfare rights unit for identifying this error and for the tenacity with which it pursued it on behalf of my constituent. This will affect the 118,000 other people who have also been wronged. My constituent suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, arthritis, hypertension and Graves’ disease. This decision left her to survive on far less than she was entitled to between 23 May 2012 and 11 August 2017, amounting to £80 a week. The DWP, having made this error, compounded the problem by refusing to allow her to complain to the independent case examiner and by failing to tell her about her right to go to the ombudsman.
The ombudsman has now recommended that, within one month of the final report, the DWP should write to my constituent to apologise for the impact of maladministration on her life, make a payment of £7,500 to compensate her for the impact and apply the appropriate rate of interest to the benefit arrears payment of £19,832.55. Will the Minister give me an undertaking that the DWP will comply with the ombudsman’s recommendations on behalf of my constituent?
David Rutley
As I said right at the beginning, the hon. Gentleman has represented his constituent’s case well, as I would expect. We apologise unreservedly for the situation in which his constituent, Ms U, found herself. We will pay the compensation and the interest, as set out in the report. That will happen, and I very much hope we can get the apology over to her well before the month set out by the ombudsman. I will gladly discuss this further with the hon. Gentleman after this urgent question.