Welfare cheats cost UK taxpayers £9.9bn in overpaid benefits last year

Benefit claimants were overpaid almost £10bn last year amid a rise in fraud by welfare cheats.

Overpayments due to fraud and error totaled £9.9bn in the financial year to April, up from £9.4bn in the previous 12 months, according to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

The figure marks a threefold increase on the £3.3bn in overpayments recorded a decade ago. Of the £9.9bn overpaid last year, £6.8bn – or more than two-thirds – was estimated to be fraudulent.

The increase comes amid a surge in overall benefit payments, which stood at £309bn last year. That is up from £287bn the previous year and £172bn a decade ago.

Dishonest practices by claimants include understating their wealth, filing misleading details of their earnings and taking benefits based on the claim that they are single without informing the authorities that they live with a partner.

Each of those types of fraud or error accounted for more than £1bn of overpayments last year for Universal Credit alone.

In other cases, those receiving disability payments failed to report improvements in their health conditions that would affect their eligibility for welfare.

There have been a number of high-profile cases of claimants being found to have obtained welfare payments fraudulently in recent years.

Catherine Wieland fraudulently claimed more than £23,000 in benefits after declaring her crippling anxiety left her unable to leave the house.

But DWP found evidence of the 33-year-old from West Sussex zip-lining and surfing on holiday in Mexico, concluding after her conviction last year that she “lied repeatedly [and] milked the system for every penny she could get”. She was handed a 28-week prison sentence in March, suspended for 18 months.

Sara Morris, a 50-year-old from Staffordshire, was ordered last year to repay more than £22,000 of dishonestly claimed Personal Independence Payments (PIP) after her own social media posts about long-distance running revealed she had exaggerated the extent of her disability.

Susan Pearson, aged 58, from Wigan, Greater Manchester, was spared jail in 2025 after fraudulently claiming more than £40,000 of Universal Credit, despite keeping secret a similar sum in savings accounts.

Tsvetka Todorova, a Bulgarian jailed in 2024 for her part in the gang which ran Britain’s biggest benefit fraud, was revealed in January to be once again claiming benefits in the UK.

The crew defrauded the taxpayer of more than £50m in a scam of industrial scale, which was exposed when a policeman in Sliven, Bulgaria, informed the British authorities of a flood of cash entering the region.

While overpayments due to fraud and error increased last year, they accounted for only 3.2pc of all benefit payments, down from 3.3pc the previous year and from the peak of 4pc in the financial year ending in 2022.

The DWP has previously warned that an “increasing propensity for fraud in society” since the pandemic has led to a permanent rise in the proportion of dishonest claims in the welfare system.

But the department now hopes to bring the overpayment rate down to 2.8pc of all benefits – which would be a historic low – later this decade.

A DWP spokesman said: “We are determined to tackle fraud and error in the system, and at just 3.2pc the overall rate is at its lowest since the pandemic.

“Our new Fraud Act gives us tough new powers to go after cheats and claw back taxpayers’ money – including accessing new data from banks to help find incorrect payments.”

The spokesman added: “We’ve also secured a number of high-profile recent convictions of people committing PIP and Universal Credit fraud – proof our sustained efforts are working.”