The harsh and legally questionable cruelty inflicted on unpaid carers by the DWP provides incontrovertible evidence that the department must never get the police powers they so desperately crave.
A series of articles by the Guardian has highlighted not just the cruelty with which unpaid carers are treated but also shows that the DWP:
- knows when carers have gone over the earnings limit, but allows their claims to continue, often for months or even years before recovering the full amount and threatening carers with jail terms;
- has used laws designed to strip drug dealers of their property to snatch money from carers;
- unlawfully ignores judges’ directions in order to maximise the amount they can claw back from carers;
- misled MPs for years by promising that new technology meant large overpayments would no longer happen and so MPs did not need to take any action;
- is refusing to publish a report on the effects of overpayment recovery on claimants, years after it was completed.
The Guardian highlights the shameful treatment of Vivienne Groom who cared for her frail, elderly mother who had dementia and had suffered a stroke.
Groom got a 16 hour a week, minimum wage job at the Co-Op in 2014 and was told by a social worker she didn’t need to declare it as she was below the earnings limit.
In 2015 the Co-Op increased her hours and Groom called the DWP to say she no longer wished to claim carers allowance.
A DWP call handler told her “We’ll have to look into this and get back to you.”
She never heard back from them until 2022, when she got a letter from the DWP telling her she was being prosecuted for fraud.
Groom agreed to pay back £30 a month.
But after her mother died and left her £16,000 the DWP prosecuted Groom using the Proceeds of Crime Act, intended to take expensive cars and large houses from drug dealers, to threaten Groom with up to seven years in prison and to take all of her inheritance.
On three occasions at separate hearings, judges in the case told the DWP to calculate how much carers allowance Groom would have been entitled to if she had declared her earnings. The DWP failed to do so and on the fourth occasion the judge appears to have simply given up and allowed the DWP to take the whole legacy, even though the calculation may have showed she owed less.
Groom herself was given a 12 month community order.
The unfair treatment was compounded by the fact that Groom was refused legal aid to defend herself because she had £16,000 in capital. Yet the DWP had frozen her bank account on the day the money was paid in, meaning she had absolutely no way of accessing it.
If Groom had been able to get legal representation it is unlikely the DWP would have got away with ignoring judges’ directions and clawing back money they may not have been owed.
And, in this case, as in many others, the DWP was aware of the overpayment and did nothing about it for years.
In fact, the Guardian carried a story way back in 2019 about the failure of the DWP to act when they discovered overpayments of carers allowance or when carers told them about a change of circumstances, sometimes allowing them to build up overpayments for years before suddenly moving to recover the money. The article followed on from a Commons Work and Pensions Committee report on the same subject.
However, at the time the DWP assured MPs that they now have technology that can flag up when a carers income goes over the threshold and so large overpayments would not happen in the future.
In reality, although the DWP does have such IT systems, they are failing to follow up on red flags in many cases and large overpayments followed by fraud prosecutions continue to happen.
In a final insult, the DWP commissioned a report into Carers Allowance and the effect of overpayment recovery on carers, but they are refusing to publish it, in spite of the huge public interest in its findings being made public.
It is clear that MPs must act to force the DWP to take responsibility for informing carers when they exceed the earnings limit and to refrain from recovering innocent overpayments.
It is equally clear that the culture of bullying, intimidation and ignoring the law whenever they can get away with it makes the DWP utterly unfit to ever hold powers of search, seizure and prosecution – no matter how desperate they are to get them.
