Ministers were warned three years ago that unpaid carers were being treated unfairly and forced to repay huge sums for minor benefit breaches, a long suppressed government report has revealed.
A Department for Work and Pensions document presented to politicians in 2021 detailed how carers – the majority of whom were on low incomes and spending 65 hours a week caring for loved ones – endured financial hardship, stress and anger after being heavily penalised for falling foul of strict carer’s allowance eligibility rules.
Ministers at the DWP sat on the report until this week when it was finally made public after repeated lobbying from campaigners and a series of Guardian reports into the carer’s allowance scandal.
The release came as renewed political pressure was put on ministers to tackle longstanding problems with the benefits system.
Stephen Timms, the chair of the Commons work and pensions committee, said: “The government has known for years about flaws that have plagued the payments system for carer’s allowance but has just allowed many unpaid carers to unwittingly rack up unmanageable levels of debt.”
The committee published an eight-page letter it sent on Wednesday to the welfare secretary, Mel Stride, asking the DWP to introduce wholesale changes to the carer’s allowance to ensure people “were no longer subjected to the distress that such overpayments can cause”.
Although it was finished in 2021, ministers repeatedly blocked its publication.
The study brings to often vivid life the frustrations of hard-pressed carers with the arcane rules and often insensitive administration of the allowance. It concludes the rules were not universally well understood by carers and poorly communicated by officials.
It reveals that when carers did inadvertently breach the rules they often struggled to comprehend why the DWP had allowed them to run up overpayments, often running to thousands of pounds, and were angered by officials treating them as “cheats” over what they considered to be genuine misunderstandings.
The Guardian has revealed that more than 150,000 unpaid carers are repaying penalties, in some cases as as high as £20,000, because of the DWP’s failure to notify them when they had inadvertently breached carer’s allowance earnings rules.
Overpayments happen when a carer breaches a government-imposed cap which states they cannot earn more than £151 a week in a paid job while receiving the £81.90 allowance. Instead of asking carers to pay back the amount that exceeded the threshold, the DWP claws back the whole £81.90 for each week that was in breach.