The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been accused of forcing tens of thousands of unpaid carers to pay back huge sums – and sometimes chasing fraud prosecutions – over “honest mistakes” that could have been spotted years earlier.
The Guardian has spoken to many such affected people. Here are their stories.
Anthony, part-time charity worker, northern England
The first time Anthony became aware there was a problem with his carer’s allowance claim was when it was stopped without warning last year, leaving him out of pocket by £75.76 a week. It is now £81.90.
When he called the DWP to ask why, he was told a random check by officials had revealed he had breached the then £139 a week carer’s allowance earnings threshold (now £151) for several weeks, and as a result had been overpaid.
Although his weekly working hours had stayed the same, the earnings threshold had been uprated in April 2023 at a lower rate than the minimum wage increase. As a result, for just over three months he had inadvertently earned more than the rules allow by an average of £4.40 a week – £58 in total.
Rather than asking for the £58 back, however, the DWP insisted he repay £1,715 (plus a £50 civil penalty) – the so-called “cliff edge” punishment that means carers must pay back the entire benefit, even if they breach the earnings limit by just 1p.
He said: “I honestly do not understand how this is fair to carers. It’s actually a kick in the teeth and a disincentive to go out to work. The government want the over-50s in work and say they support carers but it appears to be in words only.”
Anthony (not his real name), who cares at least 35 hours a week for his disabled daughter and elderly father-in-law, is furious that the DWP – which ostensibly has the technology to spot the earnings breach within days – did not contact him earlier to alert him, instead allowing the overpayment to build up.
He is challenging the DWP’s decision but accepts going down the legal route will be difficult for many carers. “It’s like the DWP is unfairly punishing people who do an amazing job keeping their loved ones’ lives above water,” he said.
Helen Jacks, 56, secretary at Royal Derby hospital, Newhall, Derbyshire
Jacks has been a carer for her parents for more than 10 years. She lost her mother, who had Parkinson’s disease, during the Covid pandemic and continues to care for her 95-year-old father, Eric, who has heart problems, glaucoma and is anaemic.
Last June the DWP told her she had been earning above the carer’s allowance income threshold and must repay £1,700. Her earnings breaches over a two-year period amounted to an average of £2 a month.
The DWP stopped her carer’s allowance and as she is challenging their finding it has not been reinstated – meaning she has been without it for nearly 10 months. “I have to ask my father if I want a pair of shoes, if I want to buy some clothes,” she said.
It emerged Jacks’s earnings had increased because her employer, the NHS, was previously automatically docking her wages to cover parking charges at the hospital but when this policy ended her pay increased above the earnings threshold. She earns £12.40 an hour and works 12 hours a week over two days.
The stress led to Jacks suffering from severe heartburn, for which she had to have a gastroscopy.
She received 99 pages of documents in relation to her appeal against the DWP’s finding. “I nearly had a mental breakdown,” she said. “I’m not sleeping. I’ve had panic attacks, my asthma has been worse.”
Jacks has had the support of her MP, Heather Wheeler, but believes the DWP is acting with impunity. “The DWP are being allowed to do what they want as there is nobody who can stop them from doing this and treating carers as criminals. I have never been in trouble with the law and always obey the law.”
“It’s wrong, it’s just so, so wrong,” she said.
Lesley Turner, 60, former care worker, Darlington
Turner has cared for her 21-year-old adopted son, who has complex needs, for 12 years. Her husband cares full-time for their 32-year-old daughter.
Turner decided to use the skills she had developed caring for her son to supplement her income by working as an in-home care worker in the evenings through an agency. On two occasions, she went over the earnings threshold to the total of £60.
She was contacted by the DWP which fined her £50 and – in line with the “cliff edge” repayment rules – asked her to repay two months’ care allowance, bringing the total to about £600.
Turner appealed in July 2023, but while she waits for an outcome the department has deducted the £600 from her allowance.
The stress of trying to constantly balance the books to ensure she is below the earnings threshold prompted her to hand in her notice, which she notes came at a time when Britain ihas a chronic shortage of care workers.
“I didn’t sleep and didn’t sleep and didn’t sleep and it just impacted on everything. It was just in your head all the time that people thought you’re a cheat or a liar or fraud. It’s awful to feel that somebody in the world was viewing you that way,” she said.
Karina Moon, 62, single mother, north Wales
Moon, a carer for her disabled daughter, vividly remembers the phone call from the DWP five years ago. It said she had been overpaid her carer’s allowance, it was her fault, and she must repay £11,292.75 or be prosecuted for fraud.
She worked part-time at the weekends at Tesco, when her daughter stayed with her father, earning £9.50 an hour. As someone who kept close track of her finances she believed her net pay was well under the then £127 a week carer’s allowance threshold.
It turned out that she had inadvertently breached the earnings limits by between 50p and £3 a week since returning to work. The DWP, she said, made her “feel like a fraudster”.
Although in theory the DWP’s data-matching processes could have spotted the earnings infringements, the overpayments were allowed to continue for three years, landing her with a huge bill which she is repaying at £60 a week – meaning she will be 73 years old before it is cleared.
Originally interviewed by the Guardian as part our revelations about the carer’s allowances, Moon appeared on ITV’s This Morning show making the case for reform of the benefit as public concern about the scandal continued to grow this week.
Vivienne Groom, 59, former supermarket worker, Chester
The prosecution of Groom for benefit fraud last year – followed by further court action to seize a £16,000 inheritance given to her by the elderly mother she cared for – illustrated the ruthless way carers who fall foul of benefit rules are treated by the DWP.
She was claiming carer’s allowance while caring for her elderly mother for more than 35 hours a week when she started working part-time at the Co-op in 2014. She said she did not inform the DWP she had taken the minimum wage job because a social worker advised her she did not need to. It was, she said, an honest mistake.
In 2021, two years after she stopped claiming, the DWP contacted her about the overpayment and she agreed to repay the £16,000 at £30 a month. When her inheritance arrived the DWP froze her bank account and then informed her they were taking her to court.
At the hearing at Chester crown court in November, Judge Everett appeared to accept Groom’s explanation that it was an honest mistake. “You were doing the best you could for your mother,” he told her, handing her a 12-month community order instead of sending her to prison.
Interviewed by the Guardian, Groom described her experience as a “nightmare”.
Asked about her case last week while on a visit to north-west England, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said the benefit system needed to treat carers more fairly, adding: “Something has gone very wrong here.”
Wren Seaward, 54, project worker at homeless hostel, Norfolk
In spring last year, Seaward, a carer for her disabled husband, was given a stark choice: repay a bill of more than £5,000 or be prosecuted for fraud.
The ultimatum came weeks after the 54-year-old was interviewed under caution by two DWP officers who told her she had been overpaid carer’s allowance for about three years and must pay back every penny.
Seaward helps her husband, John, 64, with most aspects of daily life as a result of a serious spinal injury that means he uses a wheelchair and needs help washing and dressing.
The couple have struggled since their 15-year-old daughter, Martha, was killed in a road traffic accident in January 2014.
Seaward said this tragic loss had left her afraid to open the post – “I can’t face opening letters and reading bad news” – and so she never read the DWP’s annual letters setting out the rules for carer’s allowance.
But she felt her earnings from a part-time job in a bar were under the limit of about £130 a week she was allowed to be paid while taking the weekly benefit. Three years later, she was proved wrong.
Seaward said the DWP told her she had exceeded the earnings allowance by “sometimes just a few pounds, sometimes it was £40 or £50” and that, even though she was still providing more than 35 hours of care to her husband a week, she must pay back more than £5,000 as a result of the government’s “cliff edge” penalty.
“We couldn’t afford to pay the bills so I had to work as well. From my perspective, I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong,” she said.
Seaward was told she could pay back the bill in full or be taken to court. “I can’t risk a criminal record because I’ll lose my job,” she said. “So I had to accept it.”
She now repays £245 a month from her wages. “I can’t deny it’s put considerable financial strain on us. It stinks, to be honest. People like me are an easy target because we’re already exhausted, we’re already vulnerable people.”
Davina Ware, 66, council worker from Bath
Ware was looking forward to her retirement when, three months before her final day at work, a letter dropped through her front door. It was a demand to repay nearly £4,000.
The pain cuts afresh through the 66-year-old’s voice as she recalls the letter she received almost a year ago. She feels “humiliated”, “devastated” and “treated like a conniving thief”.
Her crime? She calculated the earnings of her part-time zero-hours council job as a monthly income, as she believed the DWP required, rather than as a four-week cycle. For this infraction she had to pay back four years’ worth of carer’s allowance. A total of £3,852.09.
Ware’s husband, Mike, 72, has lived with Parkinson’s for 20 years but it has become more advanced in recent years.
The council worker says she was told by a DWP official in the carer’s allowance unit that she could average out her monthly income to ensure she was within the £116-a-week limit at the time.
When she replied to question the penalty, the DWP sent back a list of the weeks where she had inadvertently earned more than the threshold. One week was when she unexpectedly received sick pay during Covid (the DWP later agreed to waive that week’s fine).
Ware’s penalty came four years after DWP officials promised MPs that it was “well on the way” to preventing unpaid carers from running up huge overpayments, after a damning report by a parliamentary committee.
“You know that somewhere along the line their system is wrong and we’re the ones paying the price,” she said.
