Frank Field – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Frank Field on 2014-03-27.
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many outstanding cases of social fund loan repayments his Department is curretnly pursuing; in what year each such loan was issued; what estimate he has made of the total value of such outstanding repayments; and how much his Department is paying a debt management service to pursue such repayments.
Steve Webb
At March 2013, there were 10,118,298 loans outstanding relating to 2,940,087 customers. The table below indicates the age of loans and their volumes and values.
|
Age of loan |
Loans |
Value £000 |
|
Five years and over |
1,837,896 |
218,840 |
|
Between one and five years |
5,898,911 |
595,737 |
|
Less than one year |
2,381,491 |
373,729 |
|
Total |
10,118,298 |
1,188,306 |
The Department pursues all debts available for recovery. Where we have difficulty with locating a customer and obtaining payment from them we will employ a private sector company to do this for us; for year ending March 2013 we paid £880,000 and recovered £6.1m.
Data has been included for the financial year 2012-13, the latest year for which the audited Social Fund White Paper Account is available. The 2013-14 Account will be publicly available from July 2014.
