Recommendation 21

Some of those who contacted the Department prior to the LEAP exercise starting in January 2021 received special payments of interest on top of their underpayment.54 The Department chose to stop paying interest on arrears, citing value-for-money considerations and comparability of treatment in other LEAP exercises.55 When we challenged the Department on the fairness of this treatment, it stood by its decision not to pay blanket compensation under LEAP exercises and said that ‘it was not seeing the pre-January cases in the context of the wider principle, because they had not begun a LEAP exercise’.56 We asked the Department about whether it had considered the effects of inflation on underpayments, given some of the errors go back decades. The Department told us that it was seeking only to pay people ‘what they are entitled to’, which did not include an element of compensation.57 Potential for further errors