\n<\/p>\n
Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable unpaid carers will have their cases reassessed after a damning official review concluded they had been left with huge debts because of government failure and maladministration.<\/p>\n
The review, due to be published on Tuesday, was triggered after a year-long Guardian investigation revealed how carers had been hit with draconian penalties of as much as \u00a320,000 relating to carer\u2019s allowance. Some were plunged into hardship, others were jailed.<\/p>\n
Ministers have promised to cancel or reduce penalties that were wrongly issued after the review concluded many were the result of official error rather than \u201cwilful rule-breaking\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, the government has stopped short of offering compensation to those affected. It is understood compensation was both considered by the review and by ministers but is not one of the published recommendations of the review, headed by disability policy expert Liz Sayce.<\/p>\n
The stress, ill-health and anxiety endured by carers who were pushed into debt and hardship by carer\u2019s allowance failures emerged in a series of Guardian articles over the past 20 months. Many carers said they were harassed and treated like criminals by DWP staff. Hundreds were convicted of benefit fraud.<\/p>\n
It remains unclear what will happen to carers convicted of benefit fraud as a result of official mistakes.<\/p>\n
Pat McFadden, the welfare secretary, said putting right past failures was essential to rebuild trust with unpaid carers. \u201cWe inherited this mess from the previous government, but we\u2019ve listened to carers, commissioned an independent review and are now making good for those affected,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Ministers are understood to have accepted the vast majority of the review\u2019s 40 recommendations. Sayce welcomed the government\u2019s promise to review all carer\u2019s allowance overpayments since 2015, saying the policy had \u201cmajor impacts on carers\u2019 health, finances and family wellbeing\u201d.<\/p>\n
The reassessment of overpayments is likely to focus on those whose weekly or monthly earnings fluctuated, and who were penalised despite their \u201caverage\u201d total earnings over a defined period being within allowed earnings limits.<\/p>\n
Unpaid carers who look after loved ones for at least 35 hours a week are entitled to \u00a383.30 a week carer\u2019s allowance, as long as their weekly earnings from part-time jobs do not exceed \u00a3196. But if they exceed this limit, even by as little as 1p, they must repay that entire week\u2019s carer\u2019s allowance.<\/p>\n
Under the so-called \u201ccliff-edge\u201d earnings rules, this means someone who oversteps the threshold by as little as 1p a week for a year must repay not 52p but \u00a34,331.60, plus a \u00a350 civil penalty.<\/p>\n
The draconian penalties were exacerbated by the DWP\u2019s failure to alert carers who overstepped the weekly earnings limit, even though it had access to near real-time data. This meant overpayments in some cases were allowed to accumulate for years before unwitting carers were handed huge bills.<\/p>\n
At least two social security tribunal cases this year have found in favour of carers. Andrea Tucker and Nicola Green had overpayment penalties struck out after successfully arguing their monthly part-time earnings were lawful when averaged over a one-year period. This suggests DWP policy on the treatment of fluctuating earnings since 2020 has been flawed.<\/p>\n
Echoing the wording of a report by MPs in 2019, which found breaches of the rules were mostly human error and not fraud, Sayce said: \u201cThis wasn\u2019t wilful rule-breaking \u2013 it simply wasn\u2019t clear what earnings fluctuations carers should report.\u201d<\/p>\n
The failure to offer compensation to carers whose lives were turned into a nightmare of debt and anxiety as a result of DWP failures will disappoint many carers.<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n One told the Guardian: \u201cA lot of carers have suffered serious stress and worry over this. They\u2019ve suffered ill-health as a result. It should be more than just about cancelling or reducing some overpayments.\u201d<\/p>\n Carers UK welcomed the report as a \u201cbig step forward\u201d which acknowledged \u201cthe gravity of system failures\u201d within the DWP. Its chief executive Helen Walker praised the government\u2019s commitment \u201cto put right the wrongs of the last 10 years\u201d.<\/p>\n Carers Trust\u2019s chief executive Kirsty McHugh said: \u201cAs the review makes clear, the DWP\u2019s guidance on overpayments was both wrong and confusing. It was a huge error going back a decade that meant countless carers were wrongly judged to have received overpayments of carer\u2019s allowance.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are pleased the DWP has taken it on the chin and listened to both carers and the services that support them.\u201d<\/p>\n Katy Styles, of the We Care Campaign, said: \u201cIf the Sayce review finally ensures carers can claim carer\u2019s allowance with confidence, that\u2019s not a minor tweak, that\u2019s justice.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the government delivers this, it will be a huge win for people who\u2019ve carried so much, for far too long. Carers deserve certainty, not constant anxiety.\u201d<\/p>\n The DWP\u2019s repeated failure to tackle carer\u2019s allowance design and administrative failures despite repeated warnings, not least internally by a civil servant whistleblower, caused public outrage last year and became known as the carer\u2019s allowance scandal. It has been frequently compared to the Post Office scandal.<\/p>\n Currently at least 144,000 unpaid carers are repaying more than \u00a3251m in overpayments, with the total amount in carer\u2019s allowance wrongly paid out by DWP since 2019 estimated at more than \u00a3357m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable unpaid carers will have their cases reassessed after a damning official review concluded they had been left with huge debts because of government failure and maladministration. The review, due to be published on Tuesday, was triggered after a year-long Guardian investigation revealed how carers had been hit with draconian penalties<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35093,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[4388,4387,3767,19839,2160,19840,2963,4669,1152],"class_list":{"0":"post-35092","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-allowance","9":"tag-carers","10":"tag-cases","11":"tag-dwp","12":"tag-hundreds","13":"tag-reassess","14":"tag-scandal","15":"tag-society","16":"tag-thousands"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}