Employment and Support Allowance: Underpayments

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions if she will make a statement on the employment and support allowance underpayments.

The Department is correcting some past underpayments of ESA that arose when people moved from incapacity benefit on to ESA. We realise how important it is to get this matter fixed. Clearly, the mistakes should never have happened, but we know that it is vital that it is sorted as quickly as possible. Last Thursday, I tabled a written statement that updated the House on progress since the previous written statement in October last year. We are on track to complete work on the majority of the original 320,000 cases by the end of April this year. As of 11 February, 310,000 of that overall number have started the reassessment journey. We have 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 about 400 staff to approximately 1,200 staff, 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 that this will require us to review an additional 250,000 cases. We have started this activity and will aim to complete this phase by the end of the year. Last Thursday, the Department published an ad hoc statistical publication on gov.uk that sets out further detail on the progress 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 about 600,000 cases require review and that by the end of the exercise about 210,000 arrears payments will have been made. The increase, compared with the previous estimate of 180,000, is based on additional sampling and very careful, thorough checking. Alongside the written statement that was published last Thursday, I also published an updated version of the frequently asked questions, and this has been deposited in the House Library.

Thank you for granting this urgent question, Mr Speaker.

On 21 February, the Department for Work and Pensions published a statement saying that 210,000 ill and disabled people could have been underpaid vital employment and support allowance after a grave error by the Department dating back to 2011, when it wrongly migrated them from incapacity benefit on to contributions-based ESA, denying them essential social security, such as the severe disability premium, to which income-based ESA would have entitled them.

The Government initially estimated that 70,000 ill and disabled people were underpaid. In October 2018 that number increased to 180,000 people, and now it has emerged that up to 210,000 ill and disabled people were underpaid, on average, £6,000 in social security. How can we trust that the number will not increase?

Thus far, 20,000 people have died before receiving the social security to which they were entitled. That is 20,000 people who will never be repaid what they were owed by the DWP. The Department estimates that more than £1 billion will be spent to rectify this catastrophic error, and we have now learned that it will employ up to 1,200 staff to do so.

How many people have been pushed into rent arrears, council tax arrears, debt and destitution? Will the Department listen to Labour’s demands and pay compensation to those who have been pushed into debt? What support will the Department provide to the estates of the 20,000 ill and disabled people who tragically died before they received their payment?

Given the scale of the issue in transferring to ESA, how will the Government avoid repeating this error when they transfer ill and disabled people from legacy social security on to universal credit? Given that there are currently seven reviews into ill and disabled people being underpaid, how much of the Government’s total expenditure is spent on underpayments? Finally, will the Minister apologise to the additional 30,000 disabled people, and their families, who have been denied thousands of pounds in social security, and to the 20,000 people who died before justice was done?

I thank the hon. Lady for her questions. Let me make it absolutely clear that, each and every time I have addressed the House, I have thoroughly apologised on behalf of the Department for these administrative errors. This should never have happened, and I am very happy to apologise again today. Although I wish this had never happened, we are working at pace to make sure that people receive the payments to which they are entitled.

The hon. Lady is right to say that we have reviewed the cases of people who have subsequently deceased, but she is not right about the quantities of people who would have actually benefited from this exercise. We are only part of the way through, and we do not know, as yet, the total number of deceased people who, having reviewed their case, would have been eligible for additional payments. Where we review the cases of deceased people—of course, we are reviewing all of the cases—we make the payments to their family. We are working carefully and urgently to find the families so that we can make the payments.

On the additional resources that we have made available to complete this exercise, I am sure the whole House would agree it is vital that we get on and sort this out as swiftly as possible so that people can benefit from the additional sums of ESA and other disability premiums to which they might be entitled. I am pleased that we have been able to find the additional resources to enable us to do this. I made the commitment to the House that we would complete the exercise this year, and that is what we are going to do.

The hon. Lady rightly asks what lessons we are learning, especially as we are now planning for the managed migration of people from ESA on to UC. The key lesson we have learned is to make sure that the claimant is involved in that decision. For all the right reasons I am sure, it was decided to migrate people from incapacity benefit on to ESA without contacting them—just passporting them over. I have heard Opposition Members make that call to me as we approach the managed migration, and that is the key mistake that was made. The opportunity was missed to check in with people claiming the benefit to make sure that their circumstances had not changed and that there were not additional payments to which they might be entitled, and that was the cause of this particular problem. I am determined that those lessons are learned so that, as we do the managed migration in a measured and careful way, the mistake is not made again.

How is it possible for someone with a long-term condition to have their ESA changed and their mobility car taken away without there having been any assessment or contact with them at all?

I point out to my right hon. Friend that we are talking about ESA, and the entitlement or opportunity to have a Motability car comes with personal independence payments. We are talking about a decision that the previous Labour Government made to introduce ESA and migrate people to it from incapacity benefit.

We are extremely disappointed that the Minister had to be forced to come to the House by an urgent question, rather than doing what she should have done and made this announcement via an oral statement. On Thursday, we discovered that the DWP had identified nearly double the number of cases to be re-examined and that the errors we believed to have ended in 2014 actually continued through to 2015. Those ad hoc discoveries are extremely concerning and beg the question: what other errors has the DWP missed?

What investigations is the Department doing to ensure that no other payment is affected in such a way? The most alarming aspect of this entire scandal is that 20,000 people whose claims were due to be reviewed have since died. Are the Government undertaking any investigation to determine the circumstances surrounding those deaths and whether this underpayment in any way contributed to or exacerbated those circumstances? Finally, we know that the Department is putting more resources into investigating this, but will the Minister confirm that that is new money and is not coming out of existing DWP budgets?

The hon. Gentleman asked me a range of questions. First, let me say that nobody has dragged me to the House. I regularly update the House; it is a matter of record how often I update the House through a whole series of written statements and by publishing a lot of data. I have made those commitments to the House and I regularly honour those commitments.

In terms of the additional resources, the hon. Gentleman will know that ESA has not been open for applications since the end of last year because people now apply for universal credit, so we now have extremely experienced ESA decision makers who have the time and capacity to support us with this exercise. We had recruited an additional 400 staff before the announcement that I made today.

In terms of the number of people who sadly will have deceased since we recognised this problem and who could have benefited from additional payments, we are very anxious to ensure that we contact people as soon as possible, and if we can find people’s families, we will make those payments to them. Virtually every time I come to the House or Westminster Hall, Members make allegations about the causal link between people being on benefits and them tragically taking their lives. Members need to be very careful when they say those things. As our deputy chief medical officer, Professor Gina Radford, has said, and as the NHS’s survey data show, we cannot make causal links between people being on benefits and them tragically taking their own lives.

Given that people with learning difficulties find the prospect of a face-to-face interview quite stressful and distressing, what more can the Department do to support people in that situation when they need to claim benefits?

My hon. Friend makes a good point. In not only the process for claiming new benefits but this particular exercise, a lot of effort is going into ensuring that we find people and engage with them to check whether they are eligible for these additional payments. That happens through letters, telephone calls and even home visits, to ensure that we contact people in the most appropriate way possible for them.

What is the Minister’s current estimate for how long it is going to take to complete this exercise and to correct all these very serious mistakes?

We anticipate completing the exercise this year.

What financial support is available for disabled people who incur costs relating to their condition that welfare payments are not designed to meet?

I think my hon. Friend is talking about the benefits that are available for the additional costs of disability. There are three benefits there: disability living allowance, attendance allowance and the personal independence payment. As a country, we are going to spend over £50 billion on those benefits this year, which is a £4 billion increase on 2010, and those benefits are of course uprated each year.

As the Minister knows, I have met a lot of people who suffer from acquired brain injury. Quite often, they find that the system does not really meet their needs, because the trajectory of their condition may not be clear and straightforward. They may have periods when they go through much worse phases, and Wednesday may be considerably different from Thursday. All too often, unfortunately, the way that they have been treated through all of this process has made it more difficult for them to get their minds in the right place. Will she please make sure that all 1,200 of the staff she is talking about are aware of the needs of people with acquired brain injuries?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his active engagement with me in coming into the Department so that we could absolutely get this right. It is very important, for people who have not only acquired brain injury but a whole series of conditions that are variable, that the way we do the assessments truly understands their needs. We are utterly committed to making continuous improvement not only to the work capability assessment but to the PIP assessment processes.

I welcome the overall tone of the Minister’s statement and her replies to questions so far. Will she confirm what work the Department will be doing with advice charities locally to ensure that people are aware of this process and when they can expect to be repaid the moneys they should have been due?

For the first phase of people we have contacted, we have nearly completed the exercise. Most of those people will have been contacted and we will have paid them their arrears by the end of April. As we start on the next phase, we will be contacting people by letter. We have really good stakeholder engagement with a range of disabled people’s organisations and charities to make sure that people know this is happening and, when they do receive the letters and communications, that they understand what we are trying to do, which is to make sure that they get all the benefits to which they are entitled.

I welcome what the Minister had to say about the lessons learned from this catastrophe. Will she assure us that she will take the upcoming migration pilot as an opportunity to ensure that an alternative is found to the hard stop, so that claimants who do not make an application in time for universal credit do not have their benefits cut off?