MP’s have criticised the “absolutely unacceptable behaviour” of senior welfare officials over the carer’s allowance scandal in which hundreds of thousands of unpaid carers were unfairly landed with huge debts.
Sir Peter Schofield, the permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions, came under fire on Wednesday from a select committee, which accused him of giving out “a lot of blancmange” over the DWP’s response to the scandal.
An independent review into the overpayments scandal published in November found that longstanding and “unacceptable” systemic DWP leadership failures, poor benefit design and unlawful internal staff guidance were at the root of the problems.
As well as inadvertently running up debts of thousands of pounds, carers who received overpayments often felt so desperate they contemplated suicide, the review found. It described the system as like being “at the whim of a faceless machine”.
The DWP’s longstanding failures to tackle the problems, despite a series of internal warnings and reports, were revealed in an award-winning Guardian investigation that let to ministers ordering the review by the disability expert Liz Sayce.
The chair of the work and pensions committee, Labour’s Debbie Abrahams, asked Schofield on Wednesday: “Given what the report had said, that this was a massive failure of culture, let alone competence within the department, how on earth do you explain that? That behaviour is absolutely unacceptable, surely.”
Schofield apologised for some of the DWPs mistakes on carer’s allowance and said he was determined to “make a difference” and put things right. “We are changing, we are making a difference. We got that wrong. Sorry that we got that wrong,” he told the committee.
Abrahams asked Schofield about recent Guardian revelations that an internal DWP blog written by a senior DWP director, Neil Couling, in December had blamed carers for the problems – a stance at odds with the view of both ministers and the review, which identified systemic failures in the management of the benefit.
Schofield did not answer the question, but said the department was grappling with the issue; it had now got the funding and the tools to ensure it did not happen again.
The Liberal Democrat MP Steve Darling asked Schofield what he was doing to overhaul the DWP’s approach: “It just feels like it’s just more of the same [at] one of the most challenged government departments. What culture change are you driving and what management systems are you changing to achieve real change for the DWP?”
Schofield said: “It’s partly about having the tools for the job. It’s partly about how we communicate more effectively, its about making sure the values at DWP, the values that we care, we deliver, we adapt, and together we value everybody … these are embedded in everything that we do.”
Darling replied: “You are giving me a lot of blancmange that I’m finding it difficult to nail to the ceiling. What clear evidence of management change is there? I’m concerned you are not able to give any.”
The senior civil servant replied: “We’ve got a great track record of putting things right when things go wrong. This is a department that when it knows we have to get things right we put it right.”
Schofield has been permanent secretary at the DWP since 2018, and had previously promised MPs he would fix carer’s allowance problems in 2019 when the scandal was the subject of a critical work and pensions committee report.
Ministers have ordered about 200,000 historical cases to be reassessed in which carers potentially ran up overpayments after the DWP wrongly failed to apply so-called earnings averaging rules to claims. It estimates about 26,000 carers are likely to have debts cancelled or reduced.
