Clemency Jacques’s interview under caution by benefits officials is seared into her memory. She was accused of benefits fraud and, utterly bewildered, she tried to defend herself. It did not go well. “I sat there for two hours crying,” she recalls.
In a room at the local jobcentre, officials had read her her rights “just like in the movies”. She was warned that she could face police arrest, referral to the Crown Prosecution Service and a criminal court appearance. It was “bloody scary”, she says.
Jacques, 43, who cares for her severely disabled son Alex and her frail elderly mother, had been hauled in after failing to inform carer’s allowance officials that she had returned to work after maternity leave. As a result, she had breached carer’s allowance earnings rules and been overpaid £2,600 over 10 months.
She offered to repay it straight away. She explained that the error was unintentional, one dropped plate among the hundreds she was spinning to keep her family on track.
“I apologised and said it was a complete mistake. But the interview process is designed to be as cold and dehumanising as possible, focusing on trying to prove my guilt, trying to catch me out with every statement I made.”
Jacques is one of the tens of thousands of unpaid carers each year – as a Guardian investigation has revealed – who are penalised after unwittingly falling foul of a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) carer’s allowance system notorious for its complex rules and draconian punishments.
At the heart of the issue are “cliff edge” earnings rules that mean a carer who oversteps a weekly £151 earnings limit must repay the whole £81.90 weekly allowance. A carer who earned £1 more than the threshold for 52 weeks would pay back not £52 but £4,258.80. Some are also prosecuted for fraud.
The latest figures show that last year 134,500 unpaid carers were repaying £251m in earnings-related overpayments, 11,500 of whom were deemed to owe £5,000 or more. Critics say the DWP has been negligent in failing to act on its own information that identifies overpayments as soon as they arise.
Jacques’s experience throws light on a particularly controversial aspect of the carer’s allowance scandal: the DWP policy of threatening some unpaid carers who breach earnings rules with prosecution, and then offering them the choice of paying hefty fines – called administrative penalties – in return for dropping legal action.
Earlier this year, months after her traumatic interview under caution, a DWP official called her to say that while she had committed a “prosecutable offence”, they recognised it was an unintentional error and noted that she had been cooperative.
“So I was lucky,” she recalls. “They had decided to be more lenient on me and I was given the ‘opportunity’ to sign a bit of paper admitting my guilt and agreeing to pay an administrative penalty of 50% of the overpayment.”
She resented the implication that she was guilty of fraud. It felt “like blackmail”, but she felt she had no choice but to agree to pay a charge now totalling £3,900. “I didn’t want to do this, I shouldn’t have had to do this, but I was petrified of their threat to prosecute me and my life being ruined by getting a criminal record for fraud.”
Jacques, a single mum and former NHS psychologist, had given birth prematurely to her son two years previously. “I wasn’t really on maternity leave at all. I was quite literally fighting for Alex’s life daily,” she says. She estimates he spent half of the first year of his life on hospital wards.
Her life was very stressful, plagued by sleepless nights, hours spent navigating the benefits and social care systems, and coming to terms with her mum’s declining mental capacity. She had post-traumatic stress as a result of birth complications. Her life savings were being swiftly obliterated.
She says it is frustrating that while she had indeed failed to inform the carer’s allowance section of her change in circumstances, she had told the DWP’s universal credit section of her return to work – but the two departments did not share the information.
Equally infuriating, she says, is that the DWP would have been electronically alerted to her earnings rule breach by HMRC immediately after her first pay cheque. It appears to have ignored the notification and let the overpayments run on for months.
None of the subsequent nightmare – the overpayments, the interview under caution, the threats of prosecution – would have happened if the DWP had acted swiftly to resolve the situation using the information it had from the start, she believes.
In May the DWP rejected a complaint raised on Jacques’s behalf by her then MP, Caroline Lucas, but the government has now agreed to revisit the decision after being approached by the Guardian. “We are reviewing Dr Jacques’ case as a matter of urgency,” it said.
The experience has left Jacques scarred. “I wish I had never applied for carer’s allowance in the first place,” she says. “The system unfairly punishes carers, it knows it does, and it doesn’t care.”
