Teachers, NHS staff and other essential workers who balance part-time work with caring for loved ones are quitting their jobs to avoid being hit with huge cash penalties for breaking carers’ allowance rules, a study has found.
Research into the human impact of the sanctions found they amounted to thousands of pounds, triggered by opaque rules and poor administration by welfare officials, with disastrous consequences for carers’ working lives, health and finances.
The report, published by the charity Carers UK, details carers being forced to take desperate measures to avoid breaking strict income limits, including quitting their jobs, cutting their hours, refusing pay rises, one-off cost of living payments and performance bonuses, and even working hours for free each month.
Those who unwittingly exceeded the £151-a-week earnings limit – in some cases by less than £1 – said the disproportionate penalties they were hit with for doing so had left them in huge debt, plunging them and the people they care for into hardship, and taking a heavy toll on their mental health.
The so-called ‘at the limit’ income rules mean that a carer who is over the limit must repay the full weekly benefit of £81.90. A carer who earned £1 more than the £151 threshold for 52 weeks would therefore repay not £52 but £4,258.80. Some are prosecuted for fraud.
A Guardian investigation earlier this year exposed the scale of injustices related to carers’ allowance, including the previous government’s failure to address failings it had known about for years. The latest figures show that 134,500 unpaid carers have repaid £251m in overpayments linked to their earnings, and 11,500 carers have repaid amounts of more than £5,000.
The report, published on Monday, came as a delegation of unpaid carers led by Carers UK was due to meet Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) ministers to call for urgent reforms to the benefit.
Campaigners are optimistic that their cause will be heard with more sympathy than in the past. Labour promised to review the Carers’ Allowance during the election campaign, and carers are encouraged by the appointment of Sir Stephen Timms, a vocal critic of the Carers’ Allowance’s failures in opposition, as minister responsible for the benefit.
The report, based on interviews with more than 120 unpaid carers, revealed huge anger at welfare officials for failing to warn them when they unwittingly exceeded income limits and then “treating them like criminals” when they were pursued for repayments of up to £18,000.
Some said they had stopped claiming Carer’s Allowance – the main benefit for carers worth £4,258 a year – because of the constant stress of avoiding being penalised while juggling part-time work and at least 35 hours a week of unpaid care.
Carers UK called its findings “devastating” and called for urgent reform of Carers’ Allowance, which has been called for by nearly a million unpaid carers. Designed as a financial boost for unpaid carers – regularly hailed as “unsung heroes” by politicians – the benefit has become synonymous with bureaucratic cruelty and incompetence reminiscent of the Post Office scandal.
Helen Walker, chief executive of Carers UK, said: “It is heartbreaking to hear of cases where thousands of pounds of debt have been built up. This has been going on for years and the government has not done enough to fundamentally change the situation. This simply cannot continue.”
In a statement released ahead of his meeting with campaigners, Timms praised unpaid carers and said the UK would “shut down” without the work they do to support vulnerable people.
“We recognise the challenges they face and are committed to providing unpaid carers with the support they deserve,” he said.
He added: “Meeting with organisations like Carers UK and individual carers and hearing their views and experiences is essential to help us establish the facts and make informed decisions.
“In relation to the overpayment of care benefits, we are moving quickly to understand exactly what happened so we can establish our plan to correct the situation.”
A recurring theme of the Carers UK study is how strict earnings rules prevent carers from staying in work part-time to maintain their skills and earn money while continuing to care for disabled and frail relatives. The government has said it wants to “get Britain back to work” by removing barriers to employment.
Enka Plaku, a volunteer carer for her son who stopped working after being hit with a £6,800 overpayment, told the Guardian: “They want teachers all the time, but I’m one of them, forced to be at home when I can go to work.”
The Carers UK study found widespread anger among carers because, despite DWP officials having the technology to spot income breaches as soon as they happen, they regularly failed to alert carers about them for months or years before imposing massive overpayment penalties and, in some cases, threatening prosecution.
The shock of receiving penalties – which carers said were due to oversights caused by unclear and complex income rules – was compounded by the often callous treatment of welfare officials.
An anonymous caregiver said there was “cruelty written into the [carer’s allowance] “A system that sort of erases you as a person.”
Another carer, Elizabeth Tait, who was unknowingly overpaid £1,623, told the Guardian: “I felt like a criminal, like I had committed a crime, because I was trying to understand a system that made no sense.”
