§ Mr. Ewingasked the Secretary of State for Social Services (1) if he will instruct his Department's investigators to stop immediately the practice of checking the wills of elderly deceased people;
(2) what representations he has received from the relatives of elderly deceased people whose wills have been examined by investigators of his Department;
(3) what is the total amount recovered to date from the estates of elderly deceased persons whose wills have been examined by investigators from his Department;
(4) if he will list in the Official Report the local offices of his Department from where investigators have carried out examinations of the wills of elderly deceased people;
(5) on what date instructions were issued by his office to investigators of his Department to examine the wills of elderly deceased people.
§ Mr. WhitneyInformation about an estate including the will itself is available to any member of the public (and often publicised in newspapers) and it would clearly be wrong for the Department to ignore such information where it indicates that supplementary benefit may have been overpaid. Since 1959 such information has been sought by all local offices on a routine basis from the probate authorities when the death of a supplementary benefit recipient comes to the Department's notice. The will itself may be obtained in appropriate cases, but this is not normally necessary. These procedures are referred to in paragraph 15721 of the 'S' manual, a copy of which is in the Library, and they have resulted in a total of £3,573,108 of overpaid Supplementary Benefit being paid back to the Department in 1983–84.
No central record is kept of individual correspondence with executors or relatives of deceased people. The Department's offices are expected to handle all these matters with sympathy and propriety.
We have no plans to change these procedures.