WS v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions: [2023] UKUT 81 (AAC)
Upper Tribunal Administrative Appeals Chamber decision by Judge Church on 28 March 2023 .
Read the full decision in .
Judicial Summary
Recovery of overpayments:
Whether fact of Secretary of State having access to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs data on payments to Claimant via Real Time Information data feed meant that Secretary of State had knowledge of the payments, with the consequence that the Claimant could not be said to have failed to “disclose” the relevant change of circumstances that his occupational pension had come into payment (“disclosure” necessarily involving the imparting of information which the recipient doesn’t already hold).
Whether Claimant notifying Secretary of State that he was retiring and would be receiving monthly pension payments, but not when those payments would start, put the onus on the Secretary of State to investigate all sources of information to which he had access (including the Real Time Information data feed from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) to ascertain whether payments had started, breaking the chain of causation from a claimant’s non-disclosure to the making of the overpayment.