Good morning. The victims have been accused of fraud, and sometimes convicted. They have been bewildered by demands for huge sums of money which they simply don’t have. They feel belittled by the people they call for help, and their protestations of innocence have been ignored against the evidence of an opaque IT system. They blamed themselves and felt utterly alone, until a news story revealed that there were many others in the same situation. And none of them have anything to do with the Post Office scandal.
This saga, the subject of a series of articles in the Guardian over the last few days, is different in many ways – but it has enough familiar features to remind many people of one of the great injustices of the century. It’s about thousands of unpaid carers, recipients of a small government allowance, who have been forced to pay back vast amounts because they unwittingly breached a limit on their earnings by as little as a few pounds a week.
