An unpaid carer threatened with prosecution for fraud after inadvertently breaching benefit rules has had a £1,300 penalty waived by officials after her case appeared in the Guardian.
Clemency Jacques, who cares for her disabled son and elderly mother, said she was given the choice of paying the charge or risking police arrest and a court appearance after running up a £2,600 carer’s allowance overpayment.
Jacques – who has described the offer of an administrative penalty as “like blackmail” – has now been told by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) that the charge will not be applied, though she must continue to repay the original overpayment.
The former NHS psychologist, whose case was covered by the Guardian last month, is one of 134,500 unpaid carers repaying £251m in carer’s allowance overpayments that in many cases accumulated because of DWP administrative failures.
Jacques, 43, of Brighton, said she was disappointed the terse DWP letter she received waiving the administrative penalty did not apologise for its treatment of her or explain why officials have reversed their original decision to threaten her with prosecution.
She described the letter, signed by a senior DWP counter-fraud official, as “really grudging”. It had not acknowledged the distress she experienced after being interviewed under caution followed by months of waiting to see if she would be charged with fraud, she said.
“I can only assume the letter came on the back of the Guardian article and they were embarrassed,” she said. “The sad thing is, before the article was published, I was just another number in a database. What happens to people who don’t get an article written about them?”
Earlier this year Jacques’s then MP, Caroline Lucas, asked the DWP to review its decision to penalise her, calling it “disproportionate and inhumane”, but officials refused, arguing they had followed the correct processes and taken “reasonable, necessary and proportionate” action.
When the Guardian approached the DWP about the case last month it said it was urgently reviewing it. Since then it appears to have decided the threshold for applying an administrative penalty had not been met after all and reversed its earlier decision, although this is not made clear in its letter to Jacques.
Jacques said she had incurred the overpayment after unwittingly continuing to claim £81.90 a week carer’s allowance when she returned to work after maternity leave, and started to earn more than the £151 a week carer’s allowance earnings limit, which made her ineligible to claim the benefit.
At the time, she said, she was exhausted by endless hospital visits, hours spent navigating the social care and NHS systems as well as managing her post-traumatic stress caused birth complications. All the while, she said, she was caring “twice over” for Alex and her increasingly frail mother.
Carer’s allowance earnings rules require a carer who oversteps the weekly £151 earnings limit to repay the entire allowance – so a £1 weekly breach for 52 weeks would mean repaying not £52 but £4,258.80. The DWP insists it is up to carers to report earnings breaches even when it holds that information.
Jacques told the DWP’s universal credit section she had returned to work, but it did not share this information with carer’s allowance. Although the latter would have been automatically alerted by the tax authorities of an earnings breach when she received her first pay packet, it did not act for months, allowing a large overpayment to accrue.
“I would not have had to go through any of this if the DWP had checked their emails,” she said. “They are holding me to an administrative standard which they themselves are not keeping to.”
When the DWP finally informed Jacques of the earnings breach, she said she offered to repay it straight away, describing it as “one dropped plate among the hundreds she was spinning” to stay afloat. Although she said officials accepted it was unintentional, they threatened to prosecute her anyway, and she is still not clear why.
“What they did was unethical. They left me in limbo for months, and then they said ‘we might take you to court unless you sign this bit of paper [the administrative penalty agreement] and pay us an extra £1,300,’” she said.
A DWP spokesperson said: “We have reviewed Dr Jacques’ case and removed the original administrative penalty applied to their overpayment. This government has a duty to carefully managing taxpayer money and recoup any losses to the public purse.”
