DWP spent £120 million pounds defending challenges to ESA and PIP decisions in just two years

Mike1

The DWP has spent more than £120 million fighting challenges to ESA and PIP decisions in the last two years – despite losing three-quarters of appeal tribunals.

A Freedom of Information Act response requested by the Independent newspaper reveals that the DWP spent £61 million on staff costs for the appeal process for the two benefits in 2018/2019, up from £44 million two years before.

DR UK Welfare Rights and Policy Adviser Ken Butler said: “A decade of austerity driven welfare reform has led to the obscene situation where the DWP is seemingly spending more money defending wrongful disability benefit claim decisions than it is on disabled people’s benefits.

frogmorton

Thanks Mike for this.

Shocking isn't it?🙄

Lilymary

That’s obscene! How many people’s lives could have been transformed by this money?? The Treasury has accepted that the financial packages dished out would occasionally go to people who were not strictly entitled, but the overall cause and the urgency over-rode the need to examine every application in minute detail. So they can occasionally get a sensible perspective on these things.

It would be interesting to know whether the money they save or reclaim is balanced out by these costs, rather than just the proportion of cases that succeed in an appeal.

While we hear frequent reports of genuine benefit cheats being (quite rightly) caught and fined, we don’t hear about the deserving cases suffering unnecessary hardship by not getting what they should be entitled to. Sadly most politicians’ life experiences are so far removed from this type of hardship, empathy is an alien concept to them.