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| Th e Daily Telegraph, 10 March 2006 |
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| TENS of thousands of elderly people who receive money through pension credits face having to pay part of it back to the Treasury because of overpayment blunders. |
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| The Department for Work and Pensions admitted yesterday that it would attempt to claw back cash from some of the country's poorest pensioners after official figures showed overpayments had more than tripled from pounds 40 million in 2001/2 to pounds 130 million last year. |
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| David Ruffley, the Conservative spokesman on welfare reform, accused ministers of gross mismanagement and predicted a repeat of last year's fiasco over tax credits, which saw the Government attempt to reclaim part of a total pounds 2 billion overpayment. |
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"Pensioners face the prospect of being rung up by the Department for Work and Pensions asking for its money back,'' he said.
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| Help the Aged described the move as "heartless''. |
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| A spokesman said that many pensioners would now be so worried they had been overpaid that they would cut back on essentials including heating. |
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| "Twenty per cent of pensioners are living below the poverty line,'' said Mervyn Kohler, Help the Aged's spokesman. "To go chasing some of those individuals strikes me as mean. |
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| "One of the problems with the pension credit is that the calculation of what you are entitled to is so complex that for an ordinary member of the public to know what they are being paid is right or not is impossible.'' |
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| Elizabeth Blackman, a representative for the National Pensioners Convention in the East Midlands, said: "Can they explain how it would be obvious to the average pensioner that they had been overpaid? |
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| "The problem with pension credit is pensioners are not claiming it because it's too complex so how the heck are they to realise when they've been overpaid? |
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| "The Government has been sending out reminders to people that they may be eligible to claim but this will put people off claiming.'' |
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| A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions insisted that no pensioner who had received overpayments as a result of a Government error would be required to pay money back - unless the mistakes had been "very obvious''. |
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| "If, for instance, someone had received two payments in the same week then there would be a case for repaying it,'' said the spokesman. |
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| "But this would be done sensitively. If it would cause hardship there would be no requirement to pay back the entire lump sum immediately.'' |
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| Pension credit, which is received by 3.3 million people, is a lynchpin of Gordon Brown's strategy for lifting pensioners out of poverty. The intention is to provide older people with a minimum level of income. |
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| But there have been many teething problems since it was introduced in 2003. |
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| The figures published by the Work and Pensions department show that there was overpayment in 2004/05 amounting to 2.1 per cent of total pension credit payments. |
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| Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said that it was "outrageous'' that people who had struggled with bureaucracy and endless complex forms to extract their pension credit were now being hunted down by the Government and were being asked to repay the money. |
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| James Plaskitt, the minister for benefits, said that despite the problems, pension credit was helping many pensioners out of poverty. |
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| The systems for delivering the correct sums to the right pensioners were also improving. |
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| "Pension credit continues to deliver more money to the poorest pensioners with over three million getting more money as a direct result.'' |
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| Last year Tony Blair apologised for the "hardship and distress'' suffered by poor families as a result of mis-management of the separate tax credit system run by the Treasury. |
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| In addition to pounds 2 billion of overpayments some 713,000 people were found to have been underpaid pounds 500 million. The problems were blamed in large part on malfunctioning IT systems. |
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