State Retirement Pensions: Death
(asked on 10th December 2024) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if she will make an estimate of the cost to the public purse of pension payments made to deceased recipients in each of the last ten years.
Due to data archiving in accordance with GDPR, we can only provide data from the last five financial years.
Direct Payments made into an account after the death of a customer represent only around 0.1% of total annual expenditure on pensions. Although these are treated as non-recoverable and are not enforceable by law, we can request the money back as a voluntary payment. So far, we have recovered around half of the overpayments, to avoid this becoming a long-term cost to the taxpayer.
| State Pension | Pension Credit | Total | ||||||
Year | Overpaid | Voluntary repayment | Net | Overpaid | Voluntary repayment | Net | Overpaid | Voluntary repayment | Net |
2019/20 | £71.8m | £43.3m | £28.5m | £8.6m | £4.0m | £4.6m | £80.4m | £47.3m | £33.1m |
2020/21 | £54.5m | £20.4m | £34.1m | £6.7m | £2.0m | £4.7m | £61.1m | £22.4m | £38.8m |
2021/22 | £106.6m | £53.8m | £52.9m | £13.4m | £5.4m | £8.0m | £120.0m | £59.1m | £60.9m |
2022/23 | £81.0m | £48.5m | £32.5m | £10.1m | £4.6m | £5.5m | £91.1m | £53.1m | £38.0m |
2023/24 | £143.9m | £67.3m | £76.7m | £15.2m | £5.9m | £9.3m | £159.2m | £73.2m | £86.0m |
*Above table identifies the New Debt Value and the value of recoveries of RP & PC DPADs in each financial year.
The repayments in a specific year might not match the overpayments that occurred in that year, as repayment sometimes lags.
Data is GB only and classification information is current.
Payments may have later been reversed.
Debts have not necessarily all been fully recovered.
Net value has been identified using the following Overpaid - Voluntary repayment = Net.