JCP admin error causes two overpayments to be recovered at the same time - refund possible?

Wife has IS OP and husband has ESA OP. 

When she reaches retirement age RP awarded and PS start deducting 1/3 (over £20pw) to repay IS OP.

He falls sick and claims ESA(IR) for the two of them – deductions from her RP continue at the same rate and then a bit later he starts repaying his ESA OP from the ESA (standard deduction) – double whammy.

To their credit, when I alerted Debt Management they stopped the RP deductions immediately, apologised and confirmed they should not have taken them from the time that the ESA deductions started -  I think they should have stopped when ESA was awarded.

At least £1073 was ‘over-deducted’ from her RP – I’m not clear on how possible it might be to get this repaid – Debt Management have refused.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Hi - normally Debt Management will only deduct one OP at a time and if a person is in receipt of MT benefits then deduction rate is limited to (currently) £10.20 pw. But if benefit not MT then they will take one-third.

In this case DM deducted one-third of her RP which should have been replaced with a deduction of £10.20 from his ESA when his entitlement started. Instead they continued with the deduction from RP and then also started deducting from ESA for another OP. 

So once his ESA started too much was being deducted - my question is; does a mechanism exist to get a refund of the (presumably) extra-statutory deduction?

Depends on whether the clients can afford the higher deduction in the first place.