Thu 2 May 2019 07.00 BST
Last modified on Thu 2 May 2019 10.09 BST
Pity the poor social care system. Its place as one of the most integral parts of civilised society has done nothing to win it the government’s attention; while the green paper (first due two years ago) is still MIA, a former minister is left to field his own ideas to the press. The result is prolonged suffering for huge swathes of disabled and older people, no less so for the carers left to plug the gaps. As cash-starved local authorities buckle under the pressure of paying care costs, 7 million people – that’s one in 10 of us – is currently caring for a loved one, often in financial hardship because they’ve had to give up or cut back hours at work to do it.
What a way to repay them, then: it has emerged that thousands of unpaid carers have been left in large benefit debt due to staff shortages at the Department for Work and Pensions. Carer’s allowance, worth a tiny £66.15 a week, can be claimed by those who provide at least 35 hours of care to someone who receives a qualifying disability benefit. But claimants must meet further strict criteria, such as not earning more than £123 a week or studying more than 21 hours a week. This is notoriously hard to navigate when applied to real life. Carer’s allowance has the harshest withdrawal rate in the benefits system; the way it’s constructed means some family carers are unaware that earning even £1 over the earnings threshold can result in 100% loss of their benefit. This is even more difficult for some carers. Tracking earnings can be very complicated: for example, if you are self-employed or have irregular shift patterns.
The very carers holding up the threadbare care system are criminalised
Government officials are meant to help with this: previously, claimants’ earnings were checked at the end of every tax year and any overpayments they had received were clawed back through a reduction of the following year’s benefits. But the DWP introduced a new system that was supposed to result in overpayments being picked up more quickly.
Instead, the opposite has happened, with large numbers of faulty benefit payments going undetected by officials. A new report by the government’s spending watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO), shows the DWP is now chasing just under 80,000 carers for overpayments that went unnoticed. While many overpayments were for just one week, some went on for more than a decade before they were discovered. In some cases, carers now face repaying more than £20,000 they received in error – a task that the NAO says could take 34 years.
It’s worth stressing that some of the poorest families in the country, already living with the weight of caring responsibilities, are now facing years of repayments to the state out of their already meagre income. It’s well established that carers are more vulnerable to mental and physical health problems and yet, as the NAO points out, legally the DWP doesn’t need to assess the impact on carers when seeking repayments and deductions from benefits, and has conducted no recent evaluation of the potential harm of its debt recovery policies.
It is emblematic of a social security system that has long managed to be both incompetent and cruel, all while being bad for the public purse (family carers add £132bn to the UK economy each year, meaning burning out carers is not in the government’s interests).
It is bad enough that the design of the benefit leaves carers vulnerable to making unintentional errors, but staff shortages meant that many people who had notified the DWP about changing circumstances still didn’t have their details processed. In November 2018, the department had 104,000 unprocessed change-in-circumstances notifications. The NAO report suggests a staggering two-thirds of carers with overpayments of more than £2,500 could have had them stopped earlier if there were sufficient staff to investigate those flagged cases.
Regardless, there is little chance of the government taking responsibility for its part in this. A Guardian investigation last year found the DWP is understood to be seeking hundreds of criminal prosecutions against carers due to overpaid benefits, while others face fines through civil “compliance action”. The very carers holding up the threadbare care system are criminalised, further weighed down by hardship and debt, and penalised at the whim of the state.
Instead of pushing the burden on to those who can least take it, the government should be finding ways to ease it. As the charity Carers UK is arguing, any carer whose overpayment the DWP failed to spot must have their debt written off. But let’s not stop there. Carers have long needed an urgent increase in their benefit; changes in Scotland mean carers there are now £8.50 per week better off. The earnings limit for carer’s allowance should also be increased to match increases in the National Living Wage, while officials should make it easier to report changes that may affect their benefits.
As it stands, vulnerable families are now lumbered with years of debt, in part because of governmental failure. Ministers, it appears, could not care less.
• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
