Image: Richard McKeever/Flickr, Creative Commons.
As many as 70,000 disability benefit claimants have been underpaid benefits to which they were entitled, we learned last week, with a small number underpaid by as much as £20,000. These underpayments occurred during the rollout of Employment and Support Allowance, as part of the Coalition Government’s programme of welfare reform. Despite being aware of these systematic errors since 2014, the Department for Work and Pensions are only now starting to make redress to affected claimants. Full repayment will not be made until April 2019.
As Frank Field MP, Chair of the Work of Pensions Committee MP, pointed out, there is a stark disjunct between the speed at which the department will sanction claimants or seek the return of any benefit overpayment, and their own slowness to act in this case. This hints at the imbalance at the root of Britain’s welfare contract between citizens and the state.
