The carer’s allowance overpayments scandal is surely one of the great public policy failures of recent years: a tale of official negligence and cruelty that has seen hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money wasted while causing untold misery for tens of thousands of vulnerable carers.
These avoidable failures, the dismal human impact of which is succinctly illustrated in Monday’s Carers UK study, will not come as a shock to Guardian readers who have followed our reporting of the scandal in recent months, or to the new ministerial team at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
