overpayment recovery under welfare reform act

I am not the best at reading direct from legislation so can someone confirm for me if I am right in thinking that under the new act provided a decision is reviewed that the resulting overpayment will be recoverable regardless of who is at fault?

Yes but only for those benefits listed in section 105 of the Welfare reform Act 2012.

Dunno, not come across one, haven’t looked.  However, I can imagine it going something like the following.

Paragraph slash and burn of the DM guidance.

To all DWP staff:

Where one of your idiotic colleagues wastes tax payers money (God bless our glorious chancellor) and overpays one of the great unwashed money he hasn’t any right to, then chase said punter all over town until the ingrate pays back every penny.  No excuses will be accepted.  Now get to it, tout suite.

Section 105 has to be brought in by secondary legislation which hasn’t been laid yet.  I presume it will be not be implemented before the commencement of Universal Credit.

What irritates me most is that overpayment reccovery regardless of circumstance, is simply a mandate for poor decision making and incompetence.

I believe the whole point of bringing in non reccoverable elements was not to be kind to claimants, but to drive up efficiency and reduce errors.

It is ridiculous that under the new system, a vulnerable person would be expected to know they were being overpaid, report it and put the money to one side ready to hand back…..like that has ever happened!!!

I for one am happy to clogg up the county court with these cases!!!

I haven’t read s.105 so this post comes with a suitable health warning.

As I understand it, the current intention is to make all overpayments recoverable with “guidance” as to the circumstances in which actual recovery should be sought.

The latter is neither here nor there because guidance doesn’t have any status in law law (except where legislation expressly provides otherwise).  Even if the DWP sought recovery in circumstances that appeared to go against its own guidance, it could still legally pursue recovery arguing the guidance is not at all binding.

The difficulty presented by all overpayments being deemed recoverable (assuming this is indeed correct), is that the CPAG case is completely usurped.  In the CPAG case, the DWP were attempting to recover overpayments that had already been found to be non-recoverable in the first instance.  If all overpayments are deemed recoverable, the CPAG judgment is rendered to be of no effect and no test case will resurrect it unless the DWP makes an almighty cock up in the drafting of the legislation.

As far as I can see, the only defences will be technical arguments as to the legitimacy of any purported overpayment decision (e.g. no notification of decision = no decision) or estoppel arguments in cases where the DWP has given a claimant / payee reason to believe the payment was correct AND where all such monies have been spent.

The relevant part of s105 which will be as an amendment to s71 of the Admin Act is;

(1)The Secretary of State may recover any amount of the following paid in excess of entitlement—

(a)universal credit,

(b)jobseeker’s allowance,

(c)employment and support allowance, and

(d)except in prescribed circumstances, housing credit (within the meaning of the State Pension Credit Act 2002).