Fury as 237,000 pensioners face waiting years for money they are owed by the DWP

Tory welfare chiefs are blasted today for record fraud and errors that have cost taxpayers billions – and short-changed pensioners in “severe hardship”.

The Department for Work and Pensions was told to “get a grip” after overpaying a record £8.6bn of benefits in 2021/22 – £6.5bn of it due to benefit fraud.

But the Public Accounts Committee also warned pensioners who were underpaid due to DWP errors will wait years for justice.

The DWP admits it underpaid 237,000 people £1.46bn of state pension due to errors dating back to 1985.

That estimate has already shot up by 105,000 in a year.

Now MPs warn it is set to rise higher, as the DWP “does not yet know the full extent” of the problem.

And they say it is “not certain” all cases will be resolved by December 2024, which is already a year later than hoped.

The DWP is reviewing only 4,000 cases a month – which is “too slow to meaningfully put things right” and may be “too little, too late for many”, the MPs blasted.

Among the pensioners affected include people who started claiming their pension before 2010 and should have benefited from Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP) for caring for children, sick or disabled people.

The DWP realised HRP was missing from some people’s National Insurance records, reducing their entitlement.

The government said it is hiring 1,000 more staff to trawl through old pension errors and is “deploying automation tools”.

Meanwhile the MPs demanded a plan to cut benefit fraud which is “yet to show any sign of falling back to pre-pandemic levels”.

They blasted the DWP’s claim that fraud was simply rising across society – saying officials do not “fully understand” the problem.

But they also warned a planned crackdown – which will be based on “data analytics and machine learning” – risks punishing innocent claimants with an “unfair impact on vulnerable claimants”.

Their report said the DWP “is aware of the potential for data analytics methods to generate outcomes that could have an adverse impact on certain claimants.

“For instance, some cases flagged as potentially fraudulent will turn out to be legitimate claims.”

Benefit claimants were also shortchanged by the DWP on a vast scale – with £2.1bn of benefits underpaid last year.

Committee chair Meg Hillier said: “Losses to the taxpayer to fraud and mistakes have been at record levels and rising for years.

“DWP didn’t have a plan to get a grip on the billions it was losing every year before the pandemic, and it doesn’t have one now.”

A DWP spokesperson said: “We are disappointed the committee did not recognise that we are already delivering on the bold and ambitious Fraud Plan, published in May this year, that sets out our next steps, including recruiting trained specialists and seeking new powers to help us tackle fraud.

“This builds on the existing work DWP has done to address fraud and error, with savings from correction and prevention of fraud and error totalling £2 billion last year.”