Social Security Benefits
(asked on 3rd February 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what proportion of expenditure on welfare benefits payments was classified as overpaid in each of the last 10 years.
The Department for Work and Pensions administers over 25 benefits, ensuring that the very different conditions of entitlement are met in each individual instance. We publish annual figures on the amount we estimate has been overpaid under the title ‘Fraud and Error in the Benefit System’.
The percentage of benefit expenditure estimated to have been overpaid for each of the last 10 years can be found in the table below.
Year | Amount overpaid as a percentage of the Department’s expenditure |
2009/10 | 2.2% |
2010/11 | 2.1% |
2011/12 | 2.1% |
2012/13 | 2.1% |
2013/14 | 2.1% |
2014/15 | 1.8% |
2015/16 | 1.9% |
2016/17 | 2.0% |
2017/18 | 2.2% |
2018/19 | 2.2% |
The Department for Work and Pensions has worked hard to deliver major welfare reform during much of this period, all whilst limiting fraud and error to 2.2% or less.
We continue to focus on preventing loss before it occurs, which is in everyone’s interest. Sophisticated data matching rules are increasingly allowing us to cross check what claimants tell us, with potential discrepancies being routed to our fraud investigators.
We are constantly exploring the use of new data sources, which will improve this process still further.