More than 250 UK unpaid carers risk prosecution over benefit overpayments
Guardian Exclusive: Campaigners urge ministers to intervene to prevent cruel punishments over carer’s allowance
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A series of Guardian articles have highlighted the often cruel punishments and harsh financial penalties imposed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on carers who do part-time paid jobs, causing public outrage and leading to comparisons to the Post Office scandal.
As many as one in five carer’s allowance claimants have been hit by “cliff-edge” punishments for breaching earnings limits, where going just £1 over the weekly limit means having to repay the entire benefit. A carer who earned £1 more than the £151 threshold for 52 weeks would pay back not £52 but £4,258.80.
The latest figures suggest as many as 259 carers have come into scope for legal proceedings since April after unwittingly building up large overpayments. A key criterion for referring claimants to the Crown Prosecution Service for fraud is that the overpayment sum is more than £5,000.
In two cases since April, carers have been forced to repay more than £20,000, which suggests the DWP failed to spot the allowance earnings breaches for nearly five years, even though in theory it would have been alerted electronically to the infringements early on by HMRC.
Separate figures, obtained under freedom of information laws, show thousands more carers are unknowingly building up large debts because there is an administrative backlog of 29,000 carer’s allowance cases awaiting investigation for possible breaches of earning limits.
The Carers Trust estimates a further 10,000 carers could be caught by the system over the next few months and it has urged ministers to write off any carer’s allowance overpayment charges while the review is under way.
“The review is very welcome but these alarming figures show that the root cause of the problem hasn’t gone away,” said the charity’s director of policy, Dominic Carter. “The flaws with these overpayment demands are well known by now so it is staggering that many carers are still suffering the consequences.”
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Read the original article at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/14/unpaid-carers-risk-prosecution-unwittingly-breaching-benefit-rules-dwp