Oral Answers to Questions

Luke Evans Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

The hon. Member has been an absolute superstar in her role as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for disability. She organised a brilliant event to incentivise, encourage and cajole MPs from across the House to lead by example by signing up to be Disability Confident employers, and we saw a huge increase in the number of MPs who are signed up. She is absolutely right to keep pushing, because collectively we can make a difference, and she has personally led on that.

[Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)]

What steps she is taking to tackle fraud and error in the benefits system.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)]

The Department has taken huge steps to reduce and minimise fraud and error during the last 12 months. We have introduced a range of measures, including optimising digital capability, expanding our integrated risk and intelligence service and policy functions, developing prepayment risking techniques and introducing a prepayment enhanced checking service for high-risk claims.

[Dr Evans]

I am grateful for the Minister’s answer. Of course, errors are inevitable in such a large system, be they errors with overpayment or underpayment. Apart from trying to stop that, the key thing is to make sure that they are communicated clearly and resolved swiftly, so what is his Department doing to ensure that this is the case?

[Will Quince]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: we want to see issues resolved as quickly as possible. I would stress that the vast majority—around 95%—of payments are paid correctly, and the Department has processed over 4.3 million new universal credit claims since March 2020. The priority has been to get money to those people who need it desperately as quickly as possible. To do that, we streamlined some of our normal checks, but we are currently revisiting any high-risk claims that we paid during the covid-19 trust and protect period. I would of course be very happy to meet my hon. Friend to talk about this issue in more detail.