Social Security Benefits: Overpayments
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what proportion of overpayments to deceased welfare claimants have been recovered in each year since 2020.
Answered by Andrew Western
A Direct Payment after Death (DPaD) overpayment can occur if notification of a person’s death did not arrive in time to stop a benefit payment going into their account. The process for recording a death requires administrative action by medical examiners, which is outside the control of families and the Department, and families then have 5 days in which to register the death after medical examiners have notified the Registrar.
After registration, the cross-government service, Tell Us Once, allows bereaved families to report a death to most government departments and local councils in a single step, helping us to promptly prevent overpayments when notification is received.
DWP relies on notification from next of kin, families, or other services; which is not always received promptly because they will be grieving and trying to book appointments with the Registrar. How long it takes to register a death is dependent on a wide range of circumstances linked to how and where a person passes, outside of both the department’s control and representatives of the deceased claimant. As a result, it is not always possible to prevent some overpayments from happening.
Since 2020, the Department has recorded 3 million DPaDs including debts where the overpayment reason is death. This is broken down as follows:
2020-21 396,000
2021-22 569,000
2022-23 438,000
2023-24 601,000
2024-25 502,000
2025-26 558,000
The information requested, on the proportion of overpayments recovered in those years, is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.
DWP’s published policy is to recover all overpaid benefit debt where it is reasonable and cost effective to do so. Whilst there is no legal obligation to repay a debt of this type, we recognise some people will be willing to repay money to which there was no entitlement. Where the cost of pursuing a debt would exceed the amount owed, for example in cases of small overpayments from modest estates, pursuing recovery would be a poor use of public money.
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