The DWP has waived an average of £18.50 per person.
The DWP has issued £18.50 let-offs (Image: Getty)
The DWP has cancelled more than 645,000 benefit debts in the past five years, with no further repayment required by claimants. The Department for Work and Pensions has written off nearly £12million across 645,588 claimants since 2021-22, according to the Telegraph.
That means the DWP forgave debts averaging £18.50 per claimant, because it was not considered cost-effective to chase down the money. Shadow pensions secretary Helen Whately called the write-offs ‘staggering’.
The figures include money lost to small errors as well as debts which were made subject to recovery but withdrawn once the cost was deemed too high to be cost effective, its report said.
More than half of the UK’s £333billion welfare bill in 2025-26 was spent on funding state pensions, while the rest went to working age benefits, children’s support and help for disabled people.
The DWP forecast that in real terms £342.8billion will be spent on benefits in Great Britain in 2026-27 – up from £329.1 billion the previous financial year. Nearly half of it is spent on pensions.
Since 2020/21 overall real terms benefits spending is forecast to have increased by approximately 16%. As a percentage of GDP, benefits spending is lower than it was in 2020/21 (though it is worth noting that the UK’s GDP was heavily impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in that year), but it has been increasing since 2022/23.
The state pension makes up the largest part of welfare spending, followed by universal credit, then incapacity and disability benefits.
According to DWP figures, 24.3 million people in Great Britain were claiming some form of benefits in August 2025. 10 million of these people were of working age.
A DWP spokesman said: “In the last year alone, we recovered nearly £3bn of taxpayers’ money, while continuing to strengthen our measures to prevent overpayments such as fraud occurring in the first place, including through enhanced checks.
“We continue to have an important duty to the taxpayer to recover overpayments where it is cost effective, allowing resource to focus on recovering higher-value debts.”