| The unpaid carers story is not a new one – but it was supposed to have been fixed years ago. In 2018, Hilary Osborne wrote a story for the Guardian about more than a thousand carers facing fraud prosecutions because the DWP found that they were paid too much – sometimes by a few pounds – to receive a government allowance, but the department let the errors continue for years. The problems arose after a move to a new system that was supposed to mean overpayments were picked up more efficiently. In 2019, MPs concluded that the vast majority of cases were honest mistakes, and that administrative failures at the DWP were largely to blame. “The DWP basically said, don’t worry, we’ve improved the technology, we’re going to stop this happening,” said Patrick Butler. “But it hasn’t stopped.” Patrick became aware of the continuing scale of the problem through some time-honoured journalistic methods: a whistleblower, interviews with victims, and scouring local newspapers for court reports. Readers who have contacted him have been quick to pick up on the parallels with the Post Office scandal, he said. “Each injustice has its own special identity,” he said. “But what they have in common is the sense of the little guy being crushed by the vast, impersonal, ruthless state.” The problem There are about 5.7 million carers in the UK; most of the unpaid ones are women. About 1 million people claim the carer’s allowance of £81.90 a week. To qualify, carers must provide at least 35 hours of care a week – and if they go above an earnings limit of £151 a week, or 13 hours on minimum wage, they lose the whole sum. Rather than tapering, the money drops off a cliff. As a result, a small increase in hours, a one-off bonus, or even the uprating of the minimum wage can mean that you are no longer eligible for the allowance. It is the responsibility of the carer – likely to be someone dealing with enormous stress on a low income – to realise if this happens. If they do not, the DWP’s system is supposed to pick up the discrepancy and demand repayment. But in many cases, the DWP fails to investigate for years – and so the debt mounts up. Patrick has a fuller explanation of the details in this Q&A. “It has been known for a long time that this is a crappy design, that it punishes people,” Patrick said. “But they haven’t done anything about it.” The costs “When you talk to anybody about the story, this is the bit where they stop you and say, that’s unbelievable,” Patrick said. Here’s how it works: let’s say a carer goes over the eligibility limit by £1 a week and doesn’t notice. They are immediately ineligible for the entirety of the allowance, which becomes a debt to the DWP. Over a year, their debt is not the £52 annual total by which their income increased – but the accumulated £81.90 a week benefit, or £4,259. Of course, because there has been so little change in the carer’s income, it is all too easy to miss: this is not a story about benefit cheats brazenly living the high life. And so there are many potential victims. Last year, the DWP was seeking to recover the debts of more than 145,000 people – with about 40,000 owing more than £1,000, and 12,000 owing more than £5,000. A total of 270 owed more than £20,000. In 2022-23 alone, 26,700 carers were asked to make repayments. The explanation “It can be tempting to cast the DWP as the evil empire, but it’s not,” Patrick said. “The majority of people working there are just human beings. But it is an insanely rigid system that allows no discretion at all.” In 2019, the National Audit Office conducted an investigation (PDF) into how the situation had got so bad. It explained that the DWP’s strategy for reducing fraud and error was to match claims against earnings data from HMRC. But it said that the department “has not had enough staff to follow up every case flagged”. It estimated that about two-thirds of debts of more than £2,500 could have been identified more quickly, and therefore been smaller, if enough staff were in place. There was a warning, too, that the department’s promise to fix the problem with a new system that flagged issues more quickly would in fact produce more work, not less, as 190 cases would need to be processed by each staffer a month, up from 47. “These problems could have been headed off if the DWP had put the time and resources into stopping them developing,” said Patrick. “They need more staff to process the alerts quickly and stop the debt building up. My feeling is that it’s part incompetence, part resources and part neglect.” The victims “One of the key things this story leaves you feeling is just how little value we place on unpaid carers,” said Patrick. “We very rarely talk about the fact that they basically save the NHS and social care system from collapse. And because we don’t value them, nobody ever really thinks about, how do we make their lives a bit easier.” The case studies to emerge this week, first with Patrick’s story and then from Guardian readers since, are shocking. Vivienne Groom was threatened with a prison term. The £16,000 she inherited from her mother, for whom she cared for years, was seized by the DWP: she was denied legal aid because of the inheritance even when it was frozen. Helen Grater reduced her shifts at Sainsbury’s and claimed the allowance to help care for her partner, Mark Young, after his diagnosis with throat cancer and lung disease. She took on a third shift, slightly exceeded the limit, and wound up with a bill for £5,738.40. Today’s episode of Today in Focus is about George Henderson, also in Helen Pidd’s article here, who claimed the allowance for his son John, who has learning difficulties and is addicted to heroin. It took the DWP six years to tell George he was claiming incorrectly, and he was convicted of fraud. After he was forced to sell his home to settle the debt, he attempted suicide. Although the DWP has apologised after acknowledging he had probably made an innocent mistake, it has refused to give him any of the money back. Of all these stories, the detail that has stuck with me is from Helen Grater’s: her belief that she was to blame, and that she was alone. “I felt this was my fault,” she said. “I was shocked to see how many people are going through the same thing. You know you can’t fight it. You don’t have any hope in hell.” As more cases emerge, pressure is growing on the DWP to pause the debt collections, and to rapidly overhaul its system. There are also calls for large debts to be waived altogether. “There has to be a way to sort this out,” Patrick said. “These are people who are often already in poverty, or near it. The people I’ve spoken to talk about shame, guilt, depression, and panic that their reputation will be torn to shreds. But I’m really heartened by the fact that whenever people read about this, their reaction is outrage. It is such a shocking, and deeply embedded, injustice.” | 