141: Day 2: The Carer's Allowance Scandal

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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome back to our mini series for the Paul Foot Awards.

We're speaking every day this week to a brilliant journalist or team of journalists shortlisted for this year's Paul Foot Award.

So without any further ado, let's get on with today's mini episode and find out who is up for the award today.

I'm Patrick Butler.

I'm the social policy editor at The Guardian.

I'm Josh Halliday, the North of England editor at The Guardian.

And what's the story that has brought you to the Paul Foot Awards?

We call this Carers' Allowance Scandal.

This is a story about injustices in the benefit system.

It's about how those injustices have inflicted debt and misery and untold stress on some of the most vulnerable and poorest people in our society who have devoted their lives to looking after loved ones.

Carers' Allowance is

probably the least well-known and it's definitely the least valuable benefit you can claim.

I mean, last year, during the bulk of

the time that we were covering the scandal, it was £83 a week.

How do you qualify for that benefit?

You qualify for carers' allowance if you provide full-time care for a loved one.

It could be your partner, your mother, your child, who has a disability or

is frail or chronically ill.

And you have to provide care for 35 hours a week.

About £2 an hour.

Roughly.

Roughly.

These payments are administered by the Department for Work and Pensions.

Yeah.

So we're dealing with people who've been receiving carers' allowance and then they're told you've been overpaid under this system.

Is that right?

That's right, yeah.

So in the majority of cases that we've covered, a person has started claiming carers' allowance to look after their loved one.

It means that when you're caring for your loved one full-time, you can't do full-time work.

So this is in effect a top-up.

for a salary.

It's not a replacement for a salary by any means because it's so pitifully small for the care that they provide and how much they save the country.

People are allowed to earn a certain amount of money per week while claiming this benefit.

If they step over that limit by a penny, they have to pay back the full week of carers' allowance.

So if you earn one P more than

the threshold, you have to pay back £83.

It's called the cliff edge effect.

So the DWP has this technology whereby it's been sent these alerts from HMRC about earnings and it has the ability to check those alerts but to check them it requires that a human being actually looks at it, phones up the carer, sorts out whether or not it's an issue.

What we were able to reveal is for the last five to six years they've only checked half.

of all those alerts.

Carers are then thrust into this kind of Russian roulette situation whereby, by total chance, your overpayment may be spotted in the first week and you have to pay back £83,

or it could go on for five years and you're asked to pay back £16,000

and it is entirely random.

And of course, it could be anywhere on that spectrum.

It's really extraordinary.

Do you know what the threshold is of the maximum amount you're allowed to earn in a week?

It's low.

Last year, when we were doing our investigations, the limit was £151 a week, which is about 13 hours at the national minimum wage.

So if I was a carer, I would be able to have a minimum wage job for, you know, part-time, maybe a day and a half, and still qualify for carers' allowance.

Absolutely.

But if I earned £152,

suddenly I don't qualify, but the Department for Work and Pensions doesn't let me know that I have over-earned and I'll be having to pay back that week's allowance.

They let me continue earning that amount of money, £152,

and every week that that happens, I will lose the allowance, but I won't know about it yet.

This is where it gets very interesting about risk and blame.

In Social Security law, and the DWP will always fall back on this, they will say it is up to the carer to tell us that their circumstances have changed.

One of the first cases that you reported on was that of Vivian Groom.

Can you tell me a bit more about her?

Vivian Groom was a carer for her elderly mother and claimed carers' allowance while working a part-time job, a few hours a week at a co-op.

As is the nature of part-time jobs, and often they are, by the way, in supermarkets, because that's what part-time work is like.

The nature of these jobs is that sometimes you will get unexpected holiday pay, a small bonus, or COVID pay.

It's these things that have tipped people over the edge.

She got this letter through the door to say, you are being criminally prosecuted, you owe us £16,000.

Patrick told me about this story.

I'd never heard of Kerry's allowance before.

He said, You need to go to Chestercrown Court.

I remember reading Patrick's email on my phone as I was stood a few feet away from Vivian Groom before she was about to get called into court.

I sort of struggled to understand it because it just seemed so outrageous.

It couldn't possibly be right.

I went over to speak to Vivian and her husband, and they were utterly petrified, like almost shaking.

They'd never been inside a courtroom before.

They'd never had a parking ticket before.

They were in the same courtroom that Myra Hindley was sent down down in.

The initial judge that they saw was fairly compassionate and said the DWP need to go away and justify to us why you're taking this woman's inheritance, £16,000 life-changing sum of money, when you can't prove that she knew she was earning more than the threshold.

The DWP never went away and proved that.

There was another hearing a few months later, and within minutes, a different judge just took away the inheritance.

It was devastating to watch.

She had been working and earning over the threshold, but she wasn't told about this until years later.

What's really fascinating about the Vivian Groom case is she's only earning, because of the nature of the job, you know she's only earning just a few pounds over the limit.

And at one point she says, I've been offered more hours at the co-op.

I want to come off carers' allowance.

And the DDPP says, I will get back to you on that.

And they never do.

So she blithely continues.

And even then, in 2019, she stops.

She stops caring for a mum because I think her sister comes in and takes over.

She stops caring for a mum and she cancels carers' allowance.

And so she stops receiving it.

We reckon that over that period of five years, the DWP would have received up to 60 alerts.

from HMRC saying that she had overstepped the earnings limit.

So there were multiple opportunities for DWP to say,

hang on, Vivian, can we sort this out, please?

But they didn't.

And she was trying to alert the DWP to a honest thing.

She was doing the right thing.

I mean, these are the most selfless people who've sacrificed their own lives, their own careers, everything to look after the people that they love.

And the word, you know, one of the carers put it to me that they're powered by unconditional love.

They are, but it really feels like the government takes advantage of them and then comes down like a ton of bricks when they're found to be fractionally above this draconian threshold.

Has Vivian's inheritance been returned to her?

No.

What's extraordinary is that had DWP contacted her in 2014 after a few months and said,

Mrs.

Groom, I'm sorry, you know, you're being overpaid here.

We need to sort this out.

She would have paid back possibly a few hundred quid in overpayments.

That was allowed to accumulate to £16,000.

And three years after she stopped receiving the benefit, she then gets a demand for £16,000.

So at that point, she says, oh, God, you know, oh, it's my fault.

Oh, God, sorry.

I'll pay it back.

So she's already agreed, you know, I'll pay it back 30 quid a month or whatever.

And then after that, the Department of Prosecutions, at the DWP's behest, comes back

and says, I'm not sure how they know this, but they realize that she's inherited £16,000 from the mother that she cared for for five years.

The Department of Public Prosecutions demands that they get that £16,000

off her.

So they introduce proceeds of crime laws.

Now normally these were introduced so you could track down drug king parolids.

And Ferraris and speedboats, you know, arms smugglers and so on.

That's what proceeds of crime laws were introduced for.

But they used that

to seize her £16,000.

And in court, she had no representation.

She was there by herself, facing a barrister hired by the DWP

in a completely unfamiliar legal system

in a big scary Crown Court.

And, you know, at that point, you just, you have no chance.

How many cases have there been of the DWP reclaiming reclaiming this benefit from carers who've over-earned?

Currently, I think it's 144,000 carers repaying over £250 million

in overpaid carers allowance.

We also know that since about 2018 around 10,000 unpaid carers have been prosecuted.

In the grand scheme of government coffers, not a lot of money.

A quarter of a billion pounds is a lot of money to anyone else though.

And this is not money that DWP should have let out the door.

You know, this is a parliamentary select committee that said these are honest mistakes by unpaid carers.

And the National Audit Office has been in to review it and found all sorts of problems the DWP haven't fixed in six years.

Now, Vivian was working as a carer from, did you say, 2014, that she was working as a carer and claiming this benefit.

It's now 11 years after that, and you've reported in the paper just a week or so ago about the case of of Oksana Shahar.

This is almost exactly the same story but ruining someone else's life in a different bit of the country.

Can you tell me a bit about Oksana?

Oksana was a school dinner lady and she had a zero hours contract at Sports Direct.

She worked one or two days a week where her caring duties allowed.

She cared for her teenage son Daniel who has severe autism.

They'd watched this scandal unfold following our coverage, but they, like Vivian, had told the DWP years ago that they didn't want to receive Kerr's loans anymore because Oxana was able to increase her hours at work.

They saw our stories about the Kerris Lans scandal and the people who'd been caught up in it and thought, don't worry, can't happen to us, we've done the right thing.

And then in January this year, they get the letter through the door.

You owe us £10,000 and you need to pay it back immediately.

They requested a mandatory review.

The DWP provided them with every single week of Oxana's earnings over five years when they said she'd overstepped the earnings threshold not for every single one of those five weeks

important to say

in average when you did the calculation she had earned one pound ninety two more than the threshold over the course of those five years in total that amounted to five hundred pounds more than the threshold but she was being told to repay over ten thousand pounds because of this cliff edge approach it really is shockingly unfair it's blood boiling really yeah i mean it's i know you're trying to be you're trying to be objective about it but it's it's really critical.

It's extraordinary.

And when you speak to these people, Patrick, you've done the same, it really affects you, doesn't it?

This is devastating sums of money.

People who are already living extremely difficult lives, trying to do their best.

You know, these people are coping with the ongoing trauma of caring for a loved one, thinking they're doing right and they're doing the government and the public a favor by looking after them, and they are.

Because if Oxana put her son or Vivian put her mother into state care, it would cost us vastly more as a country to look after them.

They've saved us fortunes over the years, but they've been prosecuted for the most minuscule fractions in the most cruel ways.

It's really difficult to believe it's happening and it's still ongoing.

Yes, I normally ask where does the story go next, but the scandals are still just rolling right out the door.

Hopefully we have some progress.

So when our story broke last April, May, it happened to be during

the early stages of the election campaign, and very quickly it became clear that Ed Davy, for example, made a big deal of this and Labour eventually decided said they would would would look into it as well.

So new government October Labour says we're going to commission an independent review into this which is good and it's ongoing and it's going to report in the summer.

Labour to its credit also made one or two limited changes which to be fair could have happened at any time in the last decade at a stroke which in some ways mitigated some of the effects of this.

But the cliff edge is still there and

people are still running up huge overpayments.

The DDWP have only extremely recently increased their staff numbers to clear this backlog of carers in the last few weeks.

So that means over the next sort of few weeks or months there'll be unpaid carers getting these same letters and demands through the door that have been sitting there for years because the DWP has only increased the staff to where it should be.

So, this, you know, in some senses, is that what we've covered so far is the tip of the iceberg potentially.

Thanks to Josh and Patrick, an extraordinary story, and we'll be back again tomorrow with another episode.