DWP wrongly accused PIP claimant of £28,000 fraud – then backtracked

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has wrongly stripped a disabled woman of her vital Personal Independence Payment (PIP). In a shameful example of the department’s callous and overzealous fraud-busting, the DWP tried to squeeze £28,000 in benefit ‘overpayments’ from her.

It has since apologised for and corrected the error – but only after the Big Issue caught it red-handed.

Only ever one DWP PIP error away from losing it

46 year-old Michelle Burns contacted the Big Issue after the DWP unceremoniously stopped her PIP in July 2024. As the outlet reported:

A disabled woman was left in “disbelief” after her benefits were stopped and she was mistakenly accused of owing £28,000 in overpayments to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

In July, Michelle Burns was told she should never have been granted personal independence payment (PIP), six years after she was awarded it.

Her PIP was stopped and the DWP said she would have to return all the money.

Notably, according to the DWP, Burns was ineligible for the standard rate of PIP it had awarded her in 2018. Supposedly, she had been so from the start.

It did so after putting Burns with the help of her disabled husband James Jolley, who also claims DWP PIP, through a telephone reassessment in May. As the Big Issue detailed:

Her first reassessment was this year and the DWP asked for it to be over a video call, which disappointed the couple who would have preferred it to be face-to-face.

Jolley is able to support her with the assessments, but he struggles to set up video calls because of his visual impairment – instead, it was carried out over the telephone.

Still, the assessment seemed to be “fine” and the subsequent report appeared accurate. But in May, the couple received a phone call from the DWP claiming that further evidence was needed.

Burns sent this and received her PIP as normal in June – but then in July the money was not in their bank account.

At this point, the DWP informed her she owed it tens of thousands in overpayments. Following weeks of anxiety for Burns and Jolley, the Big Issue intervened:

After the Big Issue contacted the DWP, they admitted that a mistake had been made in the accusation and apologised to Burns. She has had her PIP reinstated and the benefit overpayment scrapped.

Of course, Burns isn’t the first the DWP’s own mistakes have screwed over. In fact, the department stopped the Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey PIP only recently after its error. When she wrote about it on X, dozens more described a litany of similar DWP PIP failures. All ultimately resulted in the demonic department stopping people’s PIP benefit, which helps them live their daily lives.

Disastrous, callous plans and errors

Burns’ experience at the hands of the DWP comes as Labour mull over the responses from the infamous PIP consultation that closed in July.

As the Canary has previously reported, the then-Tory government put forward a sweep of impractical, and cruel new restrictive proposals for the disability benefit. This included Sunak’s notorious voucher scheme, and raft of other unworkable ideas. One such plan was the possibility of introducing receipts for people to claim their money back from the DWP. As the Canary’s Charlton-Dailey has pointed out though:

This is even more absurd because it almost insinuates that the DWP runs effectively enough as it is, never mind when swamped with millions of expenses requests a month.

Now, the debacle over Burn’s DWP PIP once again shows how ill-equipped it would be for this too. In fact, as Big Issue underscored, the department itself makes millions of pounds worth in errors every year. In these instances, the DWP forces claimants to “pick up the tab” in deductions from their benefits.

Of course, Burn’s case too drives home how a department rife in errors that put chronically ill and disabled people in distress and at risk is simply not fit for purpose overall. The DWP might have taken responsibility for its mistake in Burn’s benefits, but thousands of others likely go under the radar. That is, without the Big Issue‘s intervention, would it have owned up to its error?

Just at the application stage alone, the DWP makes routine rejections. The majority of these get overturned at appeal with no additional evidence. Specifically, at least seven in ten DWP PIP decisions are wrong from the get-go, as appeals have repeatedly proven. It shows the shocking scale of the DWP’s failures in this one element of its disability benefit system.

Crucially though, Burn’s DWP PIP nightmare illustrated something vital. That the whole grueling process is violent at every step. Ultimately the DWP welfare system revolves around detecting so-called fraud first, provide a social safety net after. A system like that can never redress the inequitable society in which it sits, because in both cases, they disable people by design.

Featured image via the Canary