My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall repeat as a Statement an Answer given to an Urgent Question in another place by my honourable friend the Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work. The Statement is as follows:
“The Department for Work and Pensions is correcting some past underpayments of ESA that arose while reassessing incapacity benefit claims. We realise how important it is to get this matter fixed—clearly, the mistakes should not have happened—and we know it is vital that it is sorted as quickly as possible.
Since I last updated the House in October 2018, we have made significant progress. We are on track to complete work on the majority of the original 320,000 cases by the end of April this year. By 11 February we had started 310,000 people on the reassessment journey and paid arrears of over £328 million to 58,000 people, which is significant progress. The department has also increased the number of staff working on putting these cases right, from around 400 to approximately 1,200, which will enable us to continue to complete this important activity at pace.
Following the announcement in July last year to pay cases back to the point of conversion, I confirmed in October 2018 that that will require us to review an additional 250,000 cases, with activity due to begin shortly, and we aim to complete phase 2 by the end of this year. The department also published an ad hoc statistical publication last Thursday on GOV.UK setting out further detail on the progress that it has made on processing the cases, including an updated estimate on forecast expenditure and the number of people affected. The department now estimates that around 600,000 cases require review and that by the end of the exercise around 210,000 arrears payments will have been made. The increase, compared with the previous estimate of 180,000, is based on additional assumptions and samples, and very careful checking.
Alongside the Written Statement that was published last Thursday, I also published an updated version of the frequently asked questions, which has been deposited in the House Library”.