Given that family carers save the state a staggering £161 billion a year, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) applied some leniency when discovering that one of them had, unwittingly, exceeded the £151 earnings threshold while claiming Carer’s Allowance.
Far from showing an understanding of just how easy it is to get the complicated earnings rules wrong, an investigation carried out by the Guardian newspaper reveals that DWP officials displayed a callous overzealousness when in pursuit of those unpaid carers whose part-time work pushed their income over its strict earnings limit, even if by a few pence.
Last year, tens of thousands of carers were unjustly branded benefit cheats – while some were prosecuted for benefit fraud – simply for breaching an earnings rule that they were either unaware of or did not fully understand. As a result, more than 134,000 people are being driven deep into poverty as they struggle to repay thousands in overpaid Carer’s Allowance.
Almost all of these people have been robbed of their mental and physical health, as a DWP-commissioned report into the impact of the benefit on unpaid carers testifies. And yet, the DWP insists that it is doing the right thing by the taxpayer in trying to recoup up to £251 million in overpayments from some of the poorest people in the UK, even though it is partly responsible for the tragic fiasco.
Five years ago, the DWP vowed to sort out the problems with Carer’s Allowance overpayments, declaring it would notify carers when they breached the earnings threshold. It has failed to do so in half of all such cases. The injustice of this issue has united both sides of the House of Commons in outrage.
A cross-party group of MPs is now demanding that the DWP “improve urgently how it monitors and communicates overpayments”, especially as it has not made substantive progress on the issue since the publication of a parliamentary report five years earlier.
The Work and Pensions Select Committee has also been urging the National Audit Office to re-investigate the matter, which one suspects will be the last thing the DWP wants given its own role in this awful saga. Let’s hope that an intervention by politicians, from across the political spectrum, will put a stop to this shameful episode by persuading the DWP to write off these unreasonable debts, caused in part by a government department that has been incompetently administering a badly designed state benefit.
