The Department for Work and Pensions successfully managed the introduction of the new state pension, but it is not yet clear whether the simplified system will encourage people to save more for their retirement.
The Department for Work & Pensions is not doing enough to find out how sanctions affect people on benefits.
This Departmental Overview looks at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and summarises its performance during the year ended March 2016, together with our recent reports on it.
This looks at the chain of events which led to the government paying £711m in compensation to 34,000 pensioners who retired from the Police and Firefighters’ Pension Schemes between 2001 and 2006 without receiving their full pension entitlement. Due to the extent of the legal process in the case, some police and firefighters were retired for over 15 years before they received their full pension entitlement from government.
The National Audit Office has today published the findings of its investigation into the Department for Work & Pensions’ closure of its 1993 and 2003 ‘Child Support Agency’ child maintenance schemes.
The Comptroller and Auditor General, Amyas Morse, has qualified his audit opinion on the regularity of the 2016-17 accounts of the Department for Work and Pensions. This is owing to the high level of fraud and error in benefit expenditure excluding State Pension, resulting in over and underpayments to claimants.
4 July 2017
Our 2016 memorandum was prepared to inform the Work and Pensions Committee’s inquiry into the future of Jobcentre Plus (JCP), including the likely effects of planned welfare policy changes on JCP footfall and journey time to jobcentres. In October 2017 we published an associated interactive data model allowing exploration of the time it will take for people to travel to their nearest jobcentre.
The C&AG has qualified his audit opinions on the Client Funds Accounts prepared by the Department for Work and Pensions for the 1993 and 2003 Child Maintenance Schemes on the grounds of material levels of irregular receipts and payments and misstated arrears balances. However he has given a clean audit opinion on the 2012 Child Maintenance Scheme Account after improvements in the accuracy of assessing child maintenance claims.
14 December 2017
This investigation covers a single, major cause of underpayment error in ESA. This error relates to people whose existing benefit claim was converted to ESA and who were entitled to income-related ESA but were only awarded contribution-based ESA.
In this report, we assess the value for money of the Department for Work and Pensions’ introduction of Universal Credit.
