Baroness Manzoor – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Baroness Manzoor on 2016-04-21.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, for each of the last three years, how many times official errors have resulted in (1) underpayment, or (2) non-payment, of (a) Jobseekers’ Allowance, (b) Employment and Support Allowance, (c) Universal Credit, (d) Housing Benefit, and (e) Income Support, in each local authority in the UK.

Lord Freud

DWP is unable to provide a breakdown of the number of official errors at the Local Authority level. This is because the estimation of the rate and monetary value of official errors in a particular benefit is based on a sample of cases rather than the entire caseload for that benefit, and this sample is not large enough to split at the Local Authority level.

DWP does not gather information on the number of children in a household when evaluating the rate of fraud and error in any particular benefit.