One February afternoon in 2016, Sir Robert Devereux, on the time essentially the most highly effective official within the Division for Work and Pensions (DWP), was stopped by a junior colleague as he walked by means of the automotive park of a civil service workplace in Preston, Lancashire. Was he conscious, the employee requested, in regards to the issues with carer’s allowance?
Devereux, on a flying go to to the DWP outpost, requested for particulars and promised to look into it. A couple of days later, Devereux’s workplace obtained an extended and detailed notice, full with 80 anonymised case research, setting out how years of shortcomings within the administration of the carer’s allowance profit had wasted tens of millions of kilos of taxpayers’ cash and inflicted untold hardship and distress on 1000’s of unpaid carers.
Enrico La Rocca, a civil servant primarily based in Preston’s carer’s allowance unit, wrote within the memo: “I have raised this issue many times with management up to directorate level and I have been consistently disappointed and depressed by the lack of will to improve things. I hope you will be able to put this right.”
La Rocca’s warnings, shared together with his union, centred on the difficulty of carer’s allowance overpayments. The profit is paid to about 1 million unpaid carers – individuals who perform the arduous and demanding process of offering round the clock take care of frail, sick or disabled family members. It’s the UK’s lowest-value profit, price £83.30 every week.
Those that declare it are allowed to work part-time however there’s a strict restrict on how a lot they’ll earn: in the event that they earn a single penny over that restrict – £196 every week – their total profit is taken into account to be an overpayment, a debt that’s then owed to the DWP.
This so-called “cliff edge” means a carer who earned £1 greater than the edge for 52 weeks would pay again not £52 however £4,258.80. The impact had created a debt lure, and La Rocca might see 1000’s of individuals falling into it.
La Rocca, a carer’s allowance specialist with twenty years of service underneath his belt, had turn into more and more alarmed, however his try to boost the alarm within the Preston automotive park was not the gamechanging intervention he hoped it could be.
As a substitute, it could be the primary in a collection of spurned alternatives to place issues proper. What adopted was a groundhog day sequence of DWP complacency, inertia and cover-ups.
The DWP would deny there have been issues; when the issues turned not deniable, it could usually insist carers themselves had been at fault and promise that new know-how would trip to the rescue. There could be no apologies. Little would change. The injustices borne by carers, in the meantime, would rumble inexorably on.
By the point a Guardian investigation uncovered the size of the scandal final yr, the price of that failure to place issues proper eight years beforehand had turn into vividly actual: a whole lot of 1000’s extra carers caught in an internet of avoidable distress and debt over minor guidelines breaches, 1000’s extra prosecuted for fraud, and a whole lot of tens of millions extra kilos of taxpayers’ cash wasted.
The invisible world of unpaid carers would leap on to the entrance pages of nationwide media, turn into a staple of daytime TV and a political speaking level. It will be considered a social coverage catastrophe. And, on account of the way in which it pitted an enormous and ruthless forms towards powerless and weak carers, it could be routinely in comparison with the Publish Workplace scandal.
Criminalising care
Final yr, Vivienne Groom, then 59, wept as she stood within the dock at a courtroom in Chester. A shy, quiet girl with an unblemished legal report and with out even a parking ticket to her title, she had been convicted of profit fraud and handed a 12-month neighborhood order.
She was advised the £16,000 inheritance left to her by her late mom, to whom she had supplied full-time unpaid take care of years, could be confiscated by the state. To take action, the federal government was utilizing the proceeds of crime legal guidelines – laws designed to grab the ill-gotten mansions and speedboats of gangsters and drug smugglers.
Groom’s crime was to have earned marginally extra in her part-time job in a Co-op retailer than was allowed underneath strict carer’s allowance profit guidelines. For 5 years whereas caring full-time for her aged mom, who had had a stroke, she supplemented her meagre carer’s allowance – then £60 every week – by working 16 hours every week for the minimal wage.
At a listening to the earlier November, the decide appeared to just accept Groom’s declare that she had made an “honest mistake”. As Groom had admitted guilt, the decide had little choice however to convict her, however he made it clear he wouldn’t ship her to jail – regardless of profit compliance officers having advised her she confronted as much as seven years in jail. There have been a “wealth of mitigating factors” in her favour, the decide identified, and no aggravating ones. “You were doing the best for your mother,” he declared.
Though Groom mentioned she didn’t know she was breaching carer’s allowance earnings guidelines, the DWP did – or a minimum of it ought to have identified. Over the 5 years throughout which she obtained carer’s allowance, the Guardian estimates the DWP would have obtained between 15 and 50 digital alerts warning that Groom had breached earnings limits.
Had civil servants checked the alerts originally of her declare in late 2014 they may have telephoned her, warned her of the infraction and cancelled the profit. The quantity she would have needed to repay would have been nearer £1,500, manner under the £5,000 threshold for legal prosecution, and a tiny fraction of the £17,000 she was finally compelled to repay. Had the alerts been checked, Groom’s inheritance and her popularity would have remained intact.
As a substitute, the information highlighting Groom’s inadvertent earnings infringements had been repeatedly missed by the DWP. She was not an uncommon case on this regard. In keeping with the Nationwide Audit Workplace, round this time slightly below 12% of the three,000 earnings alerts arriving on the division’s carer’s allowance part every month had been being checked.
That its personal administrative shortcomings had been partly liable for the overpayment appears to not have crossed the DWP’s thoughts when it referred her case to the Crown Prosecution Service. Vivienne’s husband, Geoff, summed up the bitter disbelief and injustice felt by many unpaid carers about their therapy: “Viv is being punished now for looking after her mum,” he advised the Guardian when the ruling was handed down final yr. “The DWP are the criminals here. This can’t be right.”
The cliff edge
The Guardian has seen proof of scores of comparable examples of “cliff-edge” circumstances, the place minor earnings breaches resulted in life-changing debt. In a single case a Lancashire college dinner woman was allowed to accrue overpayments over a five-year interval from 2013. Her earnings by no means exceeded the restrict by greater than £14.52 in any week; in some durations she overstepped the weekly threshold by simply 29p. Throughout the complete interval she earned simply £1,900 greater than she was allowed. Underneath the “cliff-edge” guidelines she was compelled to repay £14,000.
However it was not simply the cliff edge itself that created such an enormous overpayment. For years the DWP has obtained common digital alerts from HMRC warning it if a carer has probably earned greater than the weekly carer’s allowance earnings restrict. In principle, by hiring sufficient workers to examine the alerts and act on them speedily, it might determine and get rid of overpayments inside days. However as Groom discovered to her value, it appeared reluctant to take action.
The true-life consequence of this underpowered data-matching coverage was to push carers who labored part-time across the edges of the earnings restrict right into a random high-stakes lottery: a breach of the restrict is likely to be noticed by DWP immediately, it would rumble on for years earlier than lastly being detected, or it would by no means be noticed in any respect. A carer who fell foul of the earnings guidelines would possibly randomly find yourself repaying nothing, £70 or £17,000.
La Rocca’s February 2016 memo to Devereux highlighted this. “Because of the limits CAU (Carer’s Allowance Unit) have put on data-matching in recent years, overpayments that we could have picked up after less than a year have been allowed to extend to two or three years or even longer,” he wrote. It was “routine” to determine earnings-related overpayments of £5,000 or extra, he added. He’d even seen one for £24,000.
5 months later one in every of La Rocca’s managers replied to the memo. The problems he raised had been investigated. They grudgingly admitted that administrative failures had certainly occurred, however mentioned an motion plan was now in place – “the overarching control environment will be enhanced”, the jargon-heavy e-mail promised.
No thanks had been provided to La Rocca for bringing the failures to gentle. Clouded in management-speak because it was, the message was crystal clear: La Rocca ought to lay off now; the issue was sorted and the case closed.
In the meantime, a stream of avoidable overpayments continued to circulation throughout La Rocca’s desk. He wrote to the DWP’s monetary controller in March 2017 to warn that little appeared to have modified, however he was rebuffed. All the pieces was in hand, he was assured, and there could be no “further correspondence” on the matter.
More and more annoyed, he wrote to Devereaux’s successor as DWP everlasting secretary, Peter Schofield, a yr later in August 2018. What horrified La Rocca was not simply that the DWP had allowed 1000’s of carers to construct up large overpayment money owed, however the division was making ready to prosecute a whole lot of carers for profit fraud.
“I cannot see how the department can justify instigating a fraud drive on these cases … when [the] DWP is at least partially responsible for allowing their overpayments to continue unchecked,” he wrote. He added, once more with eerie prescience: “I would not be surprised if part of the true picture of the unfortunate circumstances behind these cases emerged at some point and the department would inevitably be seen in a bad light.”
La Rocca didn’t get a reply till November 2018. A senior DWP director, writing on behalf of Schofield, refused to just accept there was a lot flawed with carer’s allowance compliance work. The onus was on carers, not the DWP, to report “changes in circumstances” akin to incomes over the restrict, no matter whether or not they knew that had accomplished so.
Apart from, they added, in what was clearly meant to be a clincher, the division’s earnings compliance know-how was being upgraded as a part of a drive to forestall overpayments.
Audits, alerts and extra missed warnings
La Rocca felt his considerations had been once more being swept underneath the carpet. Nonetheless, unpaid carers had been about to get a really public champion. Frank Subject, a veteran Labour MP and the revered chair of the Commons work and pensions choose committee, had acquired wind of the difficulty.
Subject had begun to extract carer’s allowance information from the DWP, What he uncovered profoundly shocked him. Not solely had been tens of 1000’s of claimants operating up carer’s allowance money owed, however the quantities had been enormous.
In 2016, when La Rocca first raised the difficulty with DWP prime brass, the most important overpayment debt was £47,800; the next yr it was £42,000. In 2018, Subject found a claimant had been hit with a £48,500 invoice, a breach that had clearly gone undetected by the DWP for a few years.
The large monetary dangers triggered by the carer’s allowance lure had been being unfairly positioned on unpaid carers, Subject realised. He wrote to the general public spending watchdog, the Nationwide Audit Workplace, demanding an pressing investigation. “It is deeply concerning that the department has allowed claimants to accrue such eye-wateringly large overpayments,” he mentioned. “More than just an oversight, these figures suggest that systematic failings or gross incompetence – or a combination of the two – are at play.”
He went on: “It is carers who will bear the brunt of these failings as the department seeks to claw back the money from people who can ill afford to lose it.”
Subject launched a piece and pensions choose committee investigation into carer’s allowance. Its conclusions, revealed in early August 2019, had been devastating: the design of the profit in impact “set carers up for a fall”. Years of complacency and under-resourcing had allowed overpayments to “spiral out of control”, not least due to the DWP’s reluctance to correctly examine earnings alerts.
It mentioned carers had been closely penalised for making “honest mistakes”. The committee was livid that Schofield, who had appeared earlier than MPs two months earlier, had refused 3 times to apologise for the mess. The inquiry set out no fewer than 19 suggestions for change. The DWP, it concluded angrily, had “stuck its head in the sand and done nothing”.
If at this level there was political stress to repair carer’s allowance – and the DWP had promised MPs it could accomplish that – it was to not final. Inside months, in December 2019, a normal election was held. The committee was disbanded and Subject and different key MPs misplaced their seats. Three months later, Britain was in Covid lockdown. The righteous head of steam constructing round carer’s allowance disappeared.
What didn’t disappear was the damaged profit that was quietly persevering with to damage lives, and the basic flaw that with each passing week was tipping extra carers into debt and potential criminality.
‘Never again’
In April 2024 the Guardian revealed that tens of 1000’s of unpaid carers had been nonetheless inadvertently operating up large overpayments annually, a whole lot of whom had been prosecuted for fraud. Scores of carers contacted us, every with vivid and harrowing tales to inform. Many had been indignant that the identical politicians who glibly praised them as “unsung heroes” had been completely happy to supervise a brutal system that was seemingly fast to label them as fraudsters.
The scandal of a minor profit administered in a merciless and unfair method had turn into a problem for daytime TV and late-night political debate. Emboldened, carers started to combat overpayment selections in tribunals – and win. However regardless of broader consciousness, households had been nonetheless being caught out.
In January this yr, Man and Oksana Shahar, a pair who cared for his or her autistic son, Daniel, 15, obtained a letter from the DWP. “Important,” it learn in daring sort. “You have been paid more carer’s allowance than you are entitled to. You now need to pay this money back”.
The sum being demanded by the federal government was staggering: £10,180.45.
Oksana, a dinner woman who had a zero-hours contract to do store work in Sports activities Direct, was sure this might not be an earnings breach associated to carer’s allowance. As a carer, she had adopted the unfolding scandal rigorously and thought she was protected from its pitfalls. However when the letter from the DWP arrived, she realised the tremendous margins by which a carer may very well be ensnared within the debt lure.
Oksana had overstepped the earnings restrict by a median of £1.92 every week over a five-year interval. In some weeks she was paid simply 38p greater than the edge – however for that tiny infraction she is being compelled to repay £64.60 every time, the speed of carer’s allowance on the time.
The debt, Man mentioned, would “devastate us financially”.
Virtually 10 years on from La Rocca’s warning to Devereux within the Preston automotive park, the letters are nonetheless being despatched and carers each week are unknowingly falling into debt. To date 600 have been convicted in courtroom and authorized motion towards extra is constant.
In April final yr, Keir Starmer – quickly to turn into prime minister – was requested about Groom’s case on a go to to the north-west of England. “Something has gone very wrong here,” he replied. “We cannot allow that to happen again.” In October, Liz Kendall, Starmer’s work and pensions secretary, vowed to “put things right”, and in December the Labour authorities introduced an impartial evaluate of carer’s allowance overpayments and promised a “new settlement”.
The Labour authorities has launched some early adjustments to scale back overpayments being created by extending the earnings restrict and promising to completely examine 100% of earnings alerts.
A DWP spokesperson mentioned: “We understand the huge difference carers make, as well as the struggles so many face. The carer’s allowance overpayment rate is now the lowest on record and we are increasing funding and bringing in more staff to check 100% of alerts to help prevent carers falling into debt.
“But we want to go further. That’s why we’ve launched an independent review of carer’s allowance, to explore how earnings-related overpayments have happened and what changes can be made.”
However for carers with money owed to pay, and for individuals who might but nonetheless fall into the carer’s allowance debt, the guarantees of politicians haven’t left them any much less weak. Groom, who took care of her aged mom till her dying breath, stays a convicted legal, and her life inheritance now belongs to the state.
The carer’s allowance scandal – due to which 144,000 carers are repaying greater than £251m – continues to assert victims and can accomplish that for the fast future because the DWP works its manner by means of 1000’s of backlogged overpayments.
The injustices and cruelty of the system could also be with us for a while. The Shahars are interesting towards the overpayment demand. “It just seems so unfair that it’s not even real,” mentioned Man, phrases that might undoubtedly echoed by a whole lot of 1000’s of different carers. “In any sort of ethical world, this would not happen.”
