The callous treatment of thousands of carer’s allowance claimants reflects appallingly on the priorities and leadership of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and throws doubt on its capacity to learn. Liz Sayce’s independent review of the overpayments scandal exposed by the Guardian makes it clear that this benefit, which is mostly claimed by older women, was frequently an afterthought for officials. While Labour has begun to make improvements, there is still no single senior civil servant with overall responsibility for solving problems that have been in the public domain for years.
Labour deserves credit for ordering this review, and for raising the earnings threshold so that claimants can now earn £196 a week after tax before losing the allowance, which is paid to people who spend at least 35 hours a week caring for a disabled relative. But ministers and officials have a great deal more work to do. Detail of how outstanding debts totalling £250m will be dealt with has not been announced. Reform of the benefit’s cliff-edge design – which means that claimants whose earnings exceed the limit lose their entire weekly allowance – has yet to be proposed, let alone introduced. Then there is the issue of whether hundreds of people who were taken to court at the DWP’s urging, and prosecuted for fraud, should have their convictions wiped, or receive some form of compensation.
Alongside such practical and policy decisions there is the question of what to do about the DWP. It is six years since the National Audit Office and MPs on the committee for work and pensions both published highly critical reports regarding overpayments, and the system for dealing with them. But despite assurances given at the time that problems were being dealt with, the situation did not improve.
Last year, the Guardian revealed that despite the DWP having access to earnings data, meaning that claimants could have been warned when they broke the limit, only around half of automatic alerts were followed up. Other claimants were left to work it out for themselves or rack up debts sometimes totalling thousands of pounds (a year’s worth of overpayments adds up to £4,000). In addition to this, the review finds that guidance issued to claimants in 2020 was so flawed as to be invalid. Rules around the averaging of earnings, to take into account fluctuations, were impossible to follow.
The human suffering caused by this unjust system was enormous, particularly for the unfortunate minority of claimants who were prosecuted. Some of them have described life‑changing experiences of debilitating shame and fear, as well as indebtedness. At a time when ministers are eager to proclaim the benefits for public services of new artificial intelligence tools, it is chilling to learn that the algorithm used to select alerts for investigation was part of the problem. Rather than increased automation, the review highlights the use of phone calls as good practice, and says staff should be trained to deal compassionately with claimants.
This review is an important step forward. But it is not the first examination of these issues, and the real test is how change is implemented. It is disgraceful that clearly documented flaws in the operation of carer’s allowance were not sorted out by the last government. Now it is up to Labour ministers to ensure that outstanding debts are reviewed swiftly, and outdated rules swept away.
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