Exposed: The £8 billion lie – Labour is misleading you on benefit fraud
Fraud in the benefit system is falling – not rising, despite what Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall might want you to believe.
That is the message in the annual Fraud and Error in the Benefit System report, published by the Department for Work and Pensions.
The findings belie the tired political pantomime of scroungers v strivers, yet the government continues to push a narrative that implies benefit fraud is out of control, using disability benefits like PIP as a political football.
Here’s what the data actually says — and what they don’t want you to focus on.
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Fraud falling, errors rising – and it’s mostly on the DWP
Across the entire benefit system, overpayments totalled £9.5 billion (3.3 per cent) between April 2024 and April 2025 — a slight decrease from the previous year’s £9.7 billion.
Fraud accounted for £6.5 billion (2.2 per cent) of that figure — down from £7.3 billion (2.7 per cent).
Overpayments due to claimant error were £2 billion, and DWP error clocked in at £1 billion.
Meanwhile, £1.1 billion wasunderpaidto claimants, mostly due to DWP failures.
In other words, for every headline about “benefit cheats,” there are countless families, pensioners and disabled people being short-changed or stressed by a flawed system that wrongly blames them.
PIP fraud: still negligible
Disability benefit fraud has been a favourite bogeyman for politicians. But the data once again reveals the truth.
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Total PIP overpayments: £330 million (1.3 per cent)
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Of that, only £100 million was fraud – that’s just 0.4 per cent of all claimants.
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Overpayments from claimant error were £190 million (0.7 per cent).
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£40 million came from the DWP’s own mistakes.
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PIP underpayments were £40 million (0.2 per cent), all due to DWP wrongly reducing awards.
Significantly, 60 per cent of overpayments were because claimants didn’t know they needed to report a change in health – a failure of communication, not criminal intent.
So why are politicians obsessed with this tiny fraction of fraud, while ignoring the hundreds of millions in underpayments?
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The £8 billion lie
Enter Liz Kendall, Work and Pensions Secretary, who recently cited £8 billion lost to benefit fraud — a figure that is not borne out by the new DWP report. In fact, fraud across all benefits totals £6.5 billion, and that figure is falling.
To be clear: there is no £8 billion PIP fraud, no £8 billion fraud among disabled people. Liz Kendall’s statement is not just misleading — it’s demonstrably false.
This is not government. It is propaganda.
The real “welfare cheats” aren’t the poor
This whole charade ignores a larger truth: the biggest losses to the public purse don’t come from welfare fraud — they come from tax avoidance and evasion, largely by corporations and the wealthy.
Yet Labour seems as disinterested in chasing that money as the former Tory government.
Why? Because it’s politically easier to punch down — to scapegoat the poor, the sick, and the disabled — than to hold billionaires to account.
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Disabled people deserve truth, not smears
This report should empower people to push back. The facts speak loudly:
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PIP fraud is just 0.4 per cent.
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Most overpayments are errors, not scams.
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Disabled people are more likely to be underpaid than to defraud the system.
It’s time to stop the spin, stop the scapegoating, and start holding those in power accountable.
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I appreciate the thorough going relentless work of Vox Political. I think its important to demonstrate the historic precedent (s) for this meticulously organised economic and social cruelty.
I am trying to put together an article about this. Here, an extract:
This German poster (around 1938) reads: “60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People’s community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too.” Under Hitler’s regime, the attack on the disabled would be the open door to the attempts to eliminate those with other ‘defects’ and ‘deviances’ offensive to the Master Race, such as being Jewish or a gypsy or homosexual. The lack of resistance to the early signs of a coming genocide and the subsequent ‘blindness’ to the existence of the concentration camps was predicated on the successful campaigning and propaganda of the Eugenics Movement over the preceding 50 years. This movement equated disability, racial inferiority and poverty as both interconnected and inherited. Human beings characterised by these traits were a danger to the Nation and would undermine and weaken the ‘Master Race’.
( Unfortunately I coud not find a way to copy and paste the quoted Nazi poster}
Thank you for your deeply considered and chillingly relevant comment. You’re absolutely right to draw attention to the historic precedent of targeting disabled people through economic propaganda — and how that dehumanisation became a stepping stone to greater atrocities.
The Nazi poster you reference is real. It was part of the “T4 Program” propaganda campaign which prepared the German public to accept the forced euthanasia of disabled people under the guise of protecting national resources.
🖼️ It read:
“60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People’s community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too.”
This message — that disabled people are a financial burden who threaten the welfare of the “healthy” — mirrors chillingly the rhetoric we hear today:
That PIP claimants are too numerous
That fraud justifies stripping support
That the welfare bill is “unsustainable”
That those who “can’t contribute” are a drag on national recovery
As you rightly say, this kind of cruelty doesn’t arrive all at once. It is normalised in stages — through policy, through silence, and through public fatigue. That is why exposing it early and relentlessly matters so much.
Vox Political will continue to call out these patterns, not because we claim today’s politicians are Nazis — but because the politics of elimination can begin with a spreadsheet, a speech, or a budget line. And history tells us what comes next if they go unchallenged.
If you complete your article, I’d be honoured to share or quote it here — it’s a conversation we need to be having.
In fact, I wrote articles comparing Tory disability policy with Aktion T4, around a decade ago. Maybe it’s time to take those pieces out of the archive and update them.