£9,000 benefit mystery

What happened

Mr B received industrial injuries disablement benefit from Jobcentre Plus because his job had caused him to become ill with chronic bronchitis and emphysema. After Mr B died, his estate received over £9,000 in arrears of industrial injuries disablement benefit.

Jobcentre Plus told Mr B's executors that it should have been paying Mr B more in industrial injuries disablement benefit since 1997. In line with its policy of compensating the person who suffered the loss, Jobcentre Plus refused to pay interest on the money because Mr B was dead. Mr F, his executor, complained.

What we found

Two legal decisions in the 1990s had changed Jobcentre Plus's interpretation of the law about industrial injuries disablement benefit in 2000-01, benefiting several thousand claimants. Jobcentre Plus publicised the change at the time, but knew some claimants were still receiving less money than they were due.

Officials decided they could not trace the claimants because the industrial injuries disablement benefit computer system was too basic and there were too many paper files to check. So Jobcentre Plus relied on spotting the cases when claimants contacted it for another reason. At worst, it would pay the arrears when a person died. It found Mr B was one of the unpaid claimants only when he died.

In the circumstances, Jobcentre Plus's approach to tracing claimants had not been maladministrative. Jobcentre Plus has scope to make exceptions to its policy of refusing to pay interest on arrears paid after a claimant has died. Arguably, it saved money by refusing to pay interest and Mr B's estate lost money because it received only the nominal value of the arrears. In this case, we decided that no exception was needed. If Jobcentre Plus had paid Mr B in his lifetime, the estate would have received nothing or much less than £9,000.

It would have been better if Jobcentre Plus or, later, the Independent Case Examiner (ICE), had given Mr F a fuller explanation of why it had paid the arrears only after Mr B's death. But this omission was too small to be maladministration.

There was no maladministration in Jobcentre Plus's or ICE's handling of the complaint.

Putting it right

Unusually, given that we found no maladministration, we made a recommendation. This was because the number of industrial injuries disablement benefit claims will continue to fall, making the task of identifying claimants in Mr B's position more manageable.

Jobcentre Plus has agreed to review its policy on identifying people who might be eligible to receive additional industrial injuries disablement benefit, like Mr B. The aim is to meet Jobcentre Plus's own policy of paying benefits to people during their lifetime.