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BENEFITS
‘I’m literally left with nothing to live on’: DWP mistakes leave benefit claimants facing debt worth hundreds of millions
The government is seizing back hundreds of millions from benefits claimants each year to rectify its own mistakes, plunging some of the most vulnerable people in the country into debt, leaving them “devastated” and “with nothing to live on”.
And in some cases, even the allegations of debt are incorrect.
A single mother who spoke to The Big Issue was falsely accused of owing the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) more than £12,000.
Penny Davis was told she had been paid too much in universal credit and had to return that money to the DWP or it would be deducted from her wages. In reality, the DWP actually owed her more than £2,000, which she is yet to receive.
“I’m absolutely devastated. It changed everything for me,” Davis said. “Getting that letter and thinking that I’d have to pay that back made me very fearful of ever claiming again.”
It comes amid renewed outrage around the Post Office scandal, another example of a powerful public body wrongly accusing innocent people of owing huge amounts of money.
Benefit claimants expected to pick up the tab
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) overpaid £8.3 billion to benefit claimants between April 2022 and 2023. Although alleged fraud accounted for £6.5bn of this, many people face debt because of mistakes made by the DWP.
The department has admitted that £600 million of benefits overpayments during this time period were a result of its own errors, while a further £1.4bn was because of innocent mistakes by the claimant.
Responding to Davis’s case, a DWP spokesperson said: “We sincerely apologise for this error and the customer is being reimbursed. The rate of universal credit overpayments due to official error, such as this, is currently at 0.6% – its lowest ever.”
But even at its lowest, this is still impacting a huge number of people. In 2023, Citizens Advice helped 17,090 people with benefits overpayments. In the past, the DWP would pick up the tab if it made a mistake, but now claimants are often expected to pay. This can leave households facing years of having money taken off their benefits to pay a debt that came from a DWP mistake.
‘I got shingles from the stress’
Jane Wardle, another single mother, has been accused of owing the DWP £24,800. She started claiming universal credit in 2019 wh
