Five years ago the Tory MP Nigel Mills asked one of Whitehall’s most senior civil servants whether he would apologise for the fact that “many thousands” of unpaid carers were in hardship because official failures had landed them with huge debts running into tens of thousands of pounds.
Mills’s directness reflected an undercurrent of shock among MPs on the work and pensions select committee. Tipped off by a whistleblower, and an article in the Guardian, it had begun an inquiry into why so many carers, claiming relatively trivial amounts of carer’s allowance, were being effectively accused of benefit fraud.
