The fraud and error prevention scheme “Targeted Case Review’” has become a centrepiece of the Government’s plans to save billions in welfare spending. Mark Bennett, Jed Meers, and Joe Tomlinson argue that while the scheme may be delivering significant savings, its rapid expansion raises serious questions about procedural fairness, claimant welfare, and the risks of undermining trust in the Universal Credit benefits system.
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Since its launch in 2022, the Department for Work and Pensions’ Targeted Case Review scheme has grown to become the flagship component of the UK government’s plans to save billions in public spending on welfare. The fraud and error prevention scheme involves a team of around 6,000 agents (including a mix of in-house and external-provider staff) checking the accuracy of payments made to millions of Universal Credit recipients, and it has already delivered substantial projected savings – over £1 billion – to date. Now well underway, with almost 1 million case reviews completed in 2024-25 alone and incorrect payments identified in around 1 in 5 cases, the DWP expects more than £13 billion of savings to be achieved through the scheme by the end of this decade.
While such initiatives are far from new, the rapid expansion of Targeted Case Review (TCR) in recent years reflects a renewed emphasis from the DWP on accelerating efforts to recoup public funds lost to fraud and error in the welfare system. It also reflects the huge investment that the DWP has made to get the scheme up and running and “scale at pace” as it seeks to drive down levels of benefits overpayments due to fraud and error which rose significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet serious questions are raised about how ramping up efforts to tackle welfare fraud and error are balanced with appropriate safeguards for claimant welfare and procedural fairness.
The Labour Government expands counter fraud and error efforts
Since taking office in 2024, the Labour government has committed to expanding TCR far beyond its original five-year timescale. The Autumn Budget 2024 included pledges to increase the Department of Work and Pensions’ (DWP) counter fraud and error funding by £110 million in 2025-26 and to extend the TCR scheme by two years, “saving £2.5 billion in 2029-30”. As part of plans announced in the recent Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, confirmed that the scheme is to be extended once again, taking it into the 2030s and saving “an additional £1.3 billion in 2030-31.” The Chancellor also confirmed that the removal of the two-child benefit cap – one of the Budget’s most headline-grabbing announcements – will be fully costed against savings delivered through counter fraud and error initiatives such as TCR, in addition to measures designed to “crack down on tax avoidance” and “reform gambling taxation”.
The findings of our recent empirical study of claimants’ experiences of TCR reveal the review process to be intrusive, distressing to many, and to involve significant and varied administrative burdens.
Following the perceived success of the scheme, the government has announced that it will introduce similar reviews of Pension Credit – a benefit claimed by 1.4 million low-income pensioners – “starting from 2026 and ending in 2029”. Meanwhile, the DWP will “continu[e] to spend between £300 million and £400 million a year on [TCR]”, the Public Accounts Committee heard in December, which DWP officials say will “driv[e] around £3 billion to £4 billion of savings every year coming out of the system”.
What are the implications for Universal Credit claimants?
Despite the increasing scale and impact of the TCR scheme, there remain important gaps in the public understanding of its design and operation – not least its implications for the many hundreds of thousands of Universal Credit claimants, year on year, whose circumstances and ongoing entitlement to the benefit are subjected to scrutiny. The findings of our recent empirical study of claimants’ experiences of TCR reveal the review process to be intrusive, distressing to many, and to involve significant and varied administrative burdens, irrespective of eventual outcomes. While some participants reported positive interactions with supportive DWP staff who facilitated the review process, these experiences were far from universal; others described having gone without any offer of support from the DWP or information about how to access this.
In many cases, particularly involving those who are vulnerable or have complex needs, claimants face real difficulties in obtaining and providing the necessary evidence on time.
It was clear from the outset that such a large-scale administrative exercise, however justified, would be fraught with challenges and risks. Our study offers early insights into the nature and potential consequences of these risks. For instance, as part of the review process, claimants are typically contacted via their Universal Credit online journal accounts with instructions to produce evidence, such as ID documents and several months’ worth of bank statements, within strict timescales (usually 14 days). These communications tend to come without warning and contain only brief details confirming that the purpose of the review is to check whether payments made to the claimant are correct. Claimants are notified that failure to comply or engage with the review process at any point will result in these payments being stopped. Yet, in many cases, particularly involving those who are vulnerable or have complex needs, claimants face real difficulties in obtaining and providing the necessary evidence on time. There is a real risk, therefore, that a significant number of claimants face having their payments terminated not based on any finding of incorrectness, but due to a strict enforcement of these time limits and other such rules built into the TCR process.
That at least some claimants also face repeated reviews, often only several months apart – a feature of the scheme which is not, to our knowledge, referenced in any of the relevant publicly available DWP documentation – poses additional risks, especially concerning the adverse impacts on claimant wellbeing of such apparent targeted suspicion. This also raises questions about the fairness and legality of automated “data matching techniques” used to “examine claims and to identify fraud and error risks” in selecting cases for review.
Above all, the combined effects of these impacts and implications of TCR risk eroding claimants’ trust in the benefits system. This can be seen to highlight a central paradox of fair process and legitimacy at the heart of the scheme: it is in significant part designed to maintain or enhance the general public legitimacy of welfare provision by assuring the integrity of social security administration, yet it involves subjecting claimants to processes in which many feel so poorly treated that their trust in the system is broken as a result. Given that people are more likely to cooperate with public authorities when they are treated fairly, perceive them to be legitimate, and therefore trust them more, this may in fact do much to undermine the promotion of precisely the sort of cooperative behaviours that prevent instances of welfare fraud and error occurring in the first place.
The authors are grateful to LEF for supporting this research. The views in this post are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of LEF.
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