To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many alerts from the Verified Earnings and Pensions service informing his Department of carers’ earnings information were (a) passed and (b) not passed on to carers in each of the last five years; and whether he has made an assessment of the effectiveness of VEPs in preventing large value overpayments for Carer's Allowance.

Overpayments are recoverable from the Carer where there is evidence that the Carer failed to timeously inform the Department of changes in circumstances. The annual benefit uprating letter issued highlights the need to report changes such and changes in earnings. The Department also uses data from HMRC to indicate where the customer may have had a change in income and failed to inform us.

The Department also takes steps to avoid large scale overpayments that are not recoverable. This includes managing workloads at appropriate levels so changes in circumstance are processed timeously.

Caveats

• Numbers are rounded to the nearest 1,000.
• The above data has been sourced from internal DWP management information, which is intended only to help the Department to manage its business. It is not intended for publication and has not been subject to the same quality assurance checks applied to our published official statistics.
• Data for October, November, and December 2023 is not held.