The Ongoing Devastating Impact

Patrick Butler writes:

More than 250 unpaid carers risk criminal prosecution after falling foul of draconian benefit rules in the past six months, official figures reveal.

Since April, when the carer’s allowance scandal was first revealed by the Guardian, officials have begun to recoup overpayments debts from more than 15,000 carers, with 50 of them repaying sums of at least £10,000.

Campaigners and politicians have called on ministers – who have promised to learn from “problems and mistakes” with allowance – to intervene urgently to minimise the ongoing devastating impact on carers while an independent review of the benefit takes place.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, himself a carer for his teenage son, said: “I’m glad we have secured a review, but it can’t be right for the DWP to carry on like business as usual while that review takes place. At the very least, we need to see a halt to repayment demands and threats of prosecution until the review has completed and the system has been reformed.”

A series of Guardian articles have highlighted the often cruel punishments and harsh financial penalties imposed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on carers who do part-time paid jobs, causing public outrage and leading to comparisons to the Post Office scandal.

As many as one in five carer’s allowance claimants have been hit by “cliff-edge” punishments for breaching earnings limits, where going just £1 over the weekly limit means having to repay the entire benefit. A carer who earned £1 more than the £151 threshold for 52 weeks would pay back not £52 but £4,258.80.

The latest figures suggest as many as 259 carers have come into scope for legal proceedings since April after unwittingly building up large overpayments. A key criterion for referring claimants to the Crown Prosecution Service for fraud is that the overpayment sum is more than £5,000.

In two cases since April, carers have been forced to repay more than £20,000, which suggests the DWP failed to spot the allowance earnings breaches for nearly five years, even though in theory it would have been alerted electronically to the infringements early on by HMRC.

Separate figures, obtained under freedom of information laws, show thousands more carers are unknowingly building up large debts because there is an administrative backlog of 29,000 carer’s allowance cases awaiting investigation for possible breaches of earning limits.

The Carers Trust estimates a further 10,000 carers could be caught by the system over the next few months and it has urged ministers to write off any carer’s allowance overpayment charges while the review is under way.

“The review is very welcome but these alarming figures show that the root cause of the problem hasn’t gone away,” said the charity’s director of policy, Dominic Carter. “The flaws with these overpayment demands are well known by now so it is staggering that many carers are still suffering the consequences.”

Helen Walker, the chief executive of Carers UK, said: “The alerts of overpayments don’t seem to be being investigated quickly enough and government needs to invest more resource in ensuring that alerts about overpayments are swiftly looked at. This should be done now – it doesn’t need to wait for the outcome of a review.”

At the budget a fortnight ago, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said the government would look into removing the cliff edge, but officials have warned this could be a lengthy process. She also extended the carer’s allowance earnings limit to £196 from next April, which may help reduce overpayment numbers.

Guardian analysis of courts data for England shows that since April at least seven unpaid carers have been prosecuted after being referred by DWP counter-fraud officials for earnings-related breaches of carer’s allowance.

The criminalisation of unpaid carers for unwittingly overstepping earnings limits – taking them to court even in most cases after they have agreed to repay the overpayment – is one of the most controversial aspects of the carer’s allowance scandal.

In one notorious case, Vivienne Groom, an unpaid carer and part-time shop worker, was not only prosecuted for fraud but also had the £16,000 inheritance she got from the mother she cared for clawed back by the DWP using proceeds of crime laws normally reserved to seize the assets of drug barons.

The DWP has also come under fire for threatening some carers with prosecution unless they agree to pay a 50% premium on the repayment. One unpaid carer, Clemency Jacques, described her experience of this as “like blackmail”. Officials later waived her penalty after her case appeared in the Guardian. 

Although legally the onus is on carer’s allowance claimants to report any earnings limit breaches to the DWP, there is frustration that even when the department is aware of a breach it does not automatically alert claimants, meaning avoidable overpayments can accumulate for long periods, raising the risk of prosecution.

A government spokesperson said: “We recognise the challenges carers are facing, which is why we are increasing the carer’s allowance earnings threshold, giving unpaid carers the opportunity to earn more and still receive the government support they deserve.

“We have also launched a review into carer’s allowance overpayments to prevent people who devote such time and care to others from facing difficulties in the future.”