DWP compensation has doubled in the last five years

The amount of compensation payments the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has authorised has more than doubled since 2021. “Consolatory payments” are issued when DWP fucks up with your claim so much that you’re left in deep distress. They’re usually a paltry amount and are not the same as a back payment.

DWP admits compensation has shot up

Labour MP Anneliese Dodds asked the DWP about these payments via a written question:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many consolation payments have been offered, per annum for the last ten years, to benefits claimants whose cases are mishandled or excessively delayed.

She also asked other, more specific questions about consolatory payments by region and the mean and mode amount of payments. However, she was told this information isn’t available, or to provide some of this information would cost the department too much. Which is a bit rich for a department that shelled out over £12.7 million in bonuses last year.

Anyway, despite asking the question in December, it was finally answered.

Andrew Western, Under-Secretary of State for Transformation in the Department for Work and Pensions (whatever the fuck that means), answered:

Consolatory payments recognise personal impacts such as gross inconvenience or severe distress.

Complaints to DWP have increased year on year in-line with increases in caseloads, as well as the department continuing to improve its handling processes. The rise in special payments made to recognise impacts on customers’ well‑being, reflects better acknowledgement of when service has fallen short.

He also helpfully provided a table showing how many payments there’d been, the average amount and the total the DWP spent on apologising for their fuck ups in the last decade.

Figures have been rounded to the nearest 5:

Incompetence

There’s one very obvious, notable thing about the figures. There was a very dramatic leap in payments from 2020/21 to 2021/22. For some reason, the amount of consolatory payments more than doubled in just a single year. Leaping from 3,150 payments issued in the financial year ending 2021 to 6,480 in the year ending 2022.

This means the amount they spend trying to right their mistakes also shot up. From £294,315 in 2021 to £525,855.

There’s also the fact that since then, it’s only gotten worse, leaping up to 7,860 affected and 658,810 spent the following year. Since that peak, it has slowly come down, but it’s only back to where it was in 2022 when it first shot up.

It could be that this is another consequence of the beginning of the COVID pandemic and lockdowns, where everything came to a standstill. When many had excessive waits for their claims to be processed.

But compensation has nothing to do with back payments. What’s more likely is that the DWP is so shoddily ran that not only are payments being delayed, but their staff are treating claimants with utter contempt.

I know from my own experience of the DWP trying to end my claim because they didn’t open my reassessment form in time, just how unfeeling they can be. In my instance, this was their error, not mine, but I was made to feel like I was at fault. I was eventually given an extra £20 for my trouble.

In January 2025, the Canary found that DWP complaints increased by 38% in just three years.

DWP too busy blaming claimants to sort out their own problems

As we know full well though, the DWP is a disgustingly incompetent excuse for an organisation. Recently, they’ve been dragged by MPs for spending more time demonising claimants than fixing their broken system. They were forced to admit that 1 in 5 privately contracted benefit assessors aren’t safeguard trained and that 52% of new benefits assessors didn’t make it through their first year.

Partly due to this, they’ve got such a bad benefits backlog that they had to divert staff from dealing with new claims to get the reassessment figures down. This left 40,000 new PIP claimants in the lurch. And thats without the added stress they’re causing with the constant rhetoric that we’re all faking it.

The DWP and Labour may consistently blame the failures of the Tories and demonise claimants for the benefits bill. But it’s clear that the reason the department is haemorrhaging money is that the DWP is a joke of an organisation that needs razing to the ground.

Featured image via the Canary