Supported by a new and improved digital service worth £15m, the benefits department is to continue conducting reviews of historic data records, which government claims will save billions of pounds

The Department for Work and Pensions will extend a programme to comb through years of data to identify erroneous Universal Credit payments and begin reviewing Pension Credit claims that are “at risk of being incorrect”.

The recent Budget extended DWP’s Targeted Case Reviews by a year to 2031. It also introduced a new programme of Pension Credit reviews, which will begin next year and run until 2029.

The Targeted Case Review team was established in 2022 to detect errors in Universal Credit payments. Savings are made by identifying historic errors in payments and preventing future overpayments that could cause benefit recipients to rack up debts to DWP.

DWP announced in May that the team had assessed more than a million claims, saving £1.35bn through the programme. It projected that the reviews would save £13.6bn by 2030.

Following such successes, earlier this year the department signed a potential £15m deal for a supplier to help improve and expand the digital service that supports the delivery of targeted UC case reviews.

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The extension to 2031 is projected to save an additional £1.3bn in 2030-31 by correcting historic overpayments and preventing future ones, according to the Budget Red Book. The figure is based on forecasts of the number of reviews and the value of incorrect payments they identify, according to a Budget policy costings document.

Reviews look for both under and overpayments and are not “designed to detect attempts to deceive”. However, reviews can lead to a referral to the department’s counter-fraud team if investigators suspect fraud.

The Pension Credit reviews could save £370m by 2030-31, according to the policy costings document. As with Targeted Case Review, the actual savings generated will depend on DWP staff’s performance and the size of overpayments identified.

Neither move appears to have new funding attached. Instead, the reviews will be funded through savings made by correcting overpayments.