Mistakes which result in the overpayment of benefits will never be totally wiped out, councillors were told.

Bradford Council's director of customer services, Wallace Sampson, told members of the authority's social care and housing scrutiny committee yesterday that even with the best system in the world genuine errors by staff would still occur.

"There will always be that type of error in a system that processes £100 million of benefits a year," he said.

Mr Sampson attended a meeting of the committee at City Hall, along with colleagues, David Gray, head of benefits, Simon Callaghan, assessment manager of benefits, and Tracey Banfield, fraud manager, to answer questions from members about overpayments of housing benefits and council tax benefit.

Last year Bradford Council paid £4 million in benefits to people who weren't entitled to them. Out of this figure £2 million was down to errors by claimants, £1 million was fraud and £600,000 was down to errors by staff. Just 34 per cent of the money was recovered.

Mr Sampson told the meeting: "We work within the unit to minimise over-payments and our aim is to prevent them from occurring in the first place.

"By the very nature of benefits, people receiving them are on low pay and we can only recover small amounts, such as £2.50 per week from a person, so recovery payments are very slow."

He told the meeting that the department had been successful in driving error and fraud out of the system and projected overpayments for the current year were considerably lower.

Claimant errors are projected to be down from £2 million to £1.3 million, fraud down from £1 million to £303,000 and local authority errors down from £600,000 to £285,000.

Mr Sampson said this reduction was due to the number of checks in place which exceeded those recommended the Government.

"We will never get to a point where we drive out error completely," he said, but he added the figures would improve further with the introduction of a new computer system. The current system, which is 15 years old, has been blamed for some of the errors.

Chairman of the committee, Councillor Grahame Thornton (Lib Dem, Baildon), said he was reassured about the Council's overpayment policy and the committee endorsed it.