However, the Public Accounts Committee has found that underpayment rates are highest for disability benefits – meaning that disabled people are being paid less than they are entitled to from the DWP.
In 2023 to 2024, the unfulfilled eligibility rate for disability living allowance was 11.1%, equating to a total of £750m. For PIP it was 4.0%, which is a £870m loss for claimants.
The most common reason for underpayments is people failing to inform DWP that their condition has worsened or their needs have increased. It means disability benefits claimants are left with less support than they are eligible for, increasing their risk of financial hardship.
Disabled people are already more likely to face poverty, with figures from Trussell showing that 70% of people who use a food bank report having a disability.
Sense was the only disability charity to submit evidence to the report. Its chief executive Richard Kramer said that the findings “sadly come as no surprise”.
“We’ve been told again and again by disabled people that getting the help they’re entitled to has been an ordeal. In our research, half of people with complex disabilities said the benefits application process made the impact of their condition worse – it shouldn’t be like this,” Kramer said.
Sense research found half (51%) of people with complex disabilities feel humiliated during benefits assessments, and well over half (58%) of disabled people feel scared before their benefits assessment.
More than a third (37%) said applying for benefits was difficult, and half (49%) of those surveyed reported that they could not apply for benefits without the support of friends, family or a support service.
“Disabled people have been paying the price of a broken benefits system for far too long. Sense is calling on the government to use the upcoming health and disability green paper to make sure the welfare system allows disabled people to apply for benefits independently and with dignity.”
The government has flagged fraud and error within the benefits system as an area where it can make savings, and the Public Accounts Committee report agrees that “levels of fraud and error in the DWP’s benefits expenditure remain unacceptably high”.
In 2023 to 2024, £9.5bn was overpaid in benefits expenditure, up from £8.2bn the previous year. Fraud, where the DWP determines that a person should have been aware that they were not entitled to money they were receiving, accounts for £7.3bn of this.
Two-thirds of overpayments by value are related to universal credit, not disability benefits. As the Big Issue has previously reported, the fraud rate for personal independence payment (PIP) is 0%.
Labour has pledged to crack down on benefits fraud but the Public Accounts Committee raises concerns around how ministers refer to “the challenge of working against a ‘headwind’ of an increasing propensity for fraud in society”.
“This is a dangerous mindset,” the report says. It adds: “We remain concerned about the potential negative impact on protected groups and vulnerable customers of DWP’s use of machine learning to identify potential fraud.”
It notes there may be a risk of machine learning taking on human biases when it is trained on historical data, which could have “wide-scale detrimental impacts on claimants if there is a system error”.
The Public Accounts Committee also highlights waiting time for the DWP to answer phone call. On average in 2023 to 2024, callers routed to the department’s in-house lines waited longer than 15 minutes.
ESA claimants are having to wait an average of nearly 30 minutes for DWP to answer their calls.
“We asked DWP whether it is acceptable for some customers – who face real pressures in their daily lives – to wait half an hour for their calls to be answered and why outsourced providers are so much quicker to answer calls than in-house lines,” the report reads.
“DWP told us that it wanted to provide the best possible service for customers who needed to call, but it had to balance that desire with the fact that many of the staff who deal with calls to its in-house lines also process benefits because the two activities require the same skills.”
The DWP has a target of 75 working days to process PIP claims, and it fulfilled this for just over half (52%) of people in 2023 to 2024. This is well below its aim to process 75% of claims in 75 days.
The department said the health transformation programme is its long-term solution to providing a “modern and timely service for disabled customers”, introducing case management to help PIP claimants through the process, but it has admitted that it will be a “long journey” to improvement because the system is “so complex and the scale of transformation required [is] huge”.
The committee recommends that the DWP gather data to develop a deeper understanding of the experiences of different groups it supports and act to improve the services it provides. It also calls on the government to set out plans to build trust with claimants, make it easier for them to provide updates on changes of circumstances, and help ensure people receive the full amounts they are entitled to.
Big Issue has contacted the DWP for comment.
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