DWP permanent secretary Peter Schofield talking about the department’s work (Image: Parliament TV)
The DWP has spoken about major changes relating to Universal Credit. Senior officials from the department were asked about many aspects of their work in an appearance before the Work and Pensions Committee.
They spoke about their efforts to ensure customers get the right amount of benefits, including efforts to right historical issues around state pension underpayments and overpayments for other benefits, such as Carer’s Allowance. Another topic the committee were keen to get an update on was the department’s work to prevent wrongful and fraudulent payments.
DWP bosses were asked in particular about Universal Credit, where the overpayment rate was 9.7 percent for the 2024/2025 tax year, with more than £6.3billion wrongfully paid out. This is a more than threefold increase compared to 2019/2020, when £1.7billion was erroneously paid.
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DWP permanent secretary Peter Schofield assured the MPs he is working hard on the issue. He said: « Absolutely this is a big focus for us in the department. Coming out of the pandemic, we set out a tackling fraud and error plan, to really drive down fraud and error, and a number of measures that we took. »
He said that looking at the percentages, the overpayment rate for Universal Credit was at 9.4 prior to the pandemic, rising to its peak to 14.7 percent in 2021/2022, and yet it had fallen to 9.7 percent in 2024/2025.
Mr Schofield said further work is underway to crack down on overpayments: « We’ve also had the Budget, new measures announced, we’ve had the act of Parliament, that gives us new tools. »
New legislation has come in with a raft of new anti-fraud powers, including bank account checks to verify the eligibility of people on Universal Credit. These checks will also apply to those on Pension Credit and on Employment and Support Allowance, and they could be expanded to other benefits.
Mr Schofield said they hope to make further progress: « The OBR as part of their forecast in the Autumn produced their assessment of where all our measures would get us going forward. That showed us going down with fraud and error in Universal Credit going down to 4.7 percent in 2028/2029. That’s well below the pre-pandemic level. »
The top civil servant explained how this applies to the wider benefits system: « If you apply that across the whole benefits system, then that would take fraud and error in the entire benefits system to 2.8 percent, which on a comparable basis is lower than it has ever been before. That is what I’m aiming for, that is my target. »
The DWP boss also spoke about how he plans to increase efforts to tackle erroneous payments of Pension Credit. Mr Schofield told the committee: « Where we’ve focused on fraud and error really hard – and we’ve started with Universal Credit because it was the biggest area of loss we’ve seen big improvements – we can now turn our attention to Pension Credit as well. We’re also doing a targeted case review, so I can add that to the list on Pension Credit. »
Targeted case review involves DWP officials looking at a claimant’s eligibility or payments, as well as identifying changes in a person’s circumstances that they have not reported. Mr Schofield said some £300million has been invested in this project for the current year, with around 4,000 agents looking at cases.
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