Key facts
- Unpaid carers are continuing to receive overpaid carer's allowance despite reporting changes in circumstances.
- Systemic failures within the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are causing distress and potential debt for carers.
- One carer was overpaid over £1,300 after the DWP failed to stop payments following his husband's death.
- An official review identified DWP backlogs and record-keeping issues as primary causes of overpayments.
- The DWP has agreed to write off overpayments resulting from official error but has not detailed refund plans.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) continues to allow unpaid carers to accrue debt from overpaid benefits, even after being informed of changes in their circumstances. Chris Farrell, 65, a former unpaid carer, was paid £86.45 a week in carer's allowance for six months after his husband's death, accumulating a potential debt of over £1,300. Farrell repeatedly tried to stop the payments, experiencing significant distress and anxiety.
The DWP has agreed to write off Farrell's overpayment after the Guardian intervened. However, the Guardian is aware of at least five other similar cases where carers struggled to halt benefit payments despite notifying the DWP they were no longer eligible or caring for someone.
These cases, highlighted by the charity Carers UK, reveal systemic flaws in DWP systems that fail to efficiently process changes in circumstances. This leads to carers being left with unwanted payments, facing potential penalties, and experiencing considerable anxiety. One carer accumulated over £2,000 in unwanted allowance after their mother went into a care home, having contacted the DWP five times without success. Another was overpaid more than £2,650 after reporting taking on a new work contract over a year ago.
An official review by disability rights expert Liz Sayce found that DWP backlogs and record-keeping issues were largely responsible for a "tsunami" of overpayments amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds over five years. The review recommended that the DWP refund carers penalized by these failures, a recommendation the DWP accepted but has yet to detail plans for implementing.
Campaigners argue that these ongoing system flaws leave carers vulnerable to penalties and cause significant distress. The DWP stated it is committed to modernizing carer's allowance to make it fairer and simpler, and that once a claimant correctly reports a change, their responsibility is discharged, with any subsequent overpayments due to official error being written off.