‘The little guy crushed by a ruthless state’ – how the carers scandal is growing

Good morning. The victims have been accused of fraud, and sometimes convicted. They have been bewildered by demands for huge sums of money which they simply don’t have. They feel belittled by the people they call for help, and their protestations of innocence have been ignored against the evidence of an opaque IT system. They blamed themselves and felt utterly alone, until a news story revealed that there were many others in the same situation. And none of them have anything to do with the Post Office scandal.

This saga, the subject of a series of articles in the Guardian over the last few days, is different in many ways – but it has enough familiar features to remind many people of one of the great injustices of the century. It’s about thousands of unpaid carers, recipients of a small government allowance, who have been forced to pay back vast amounts because they unwittingly breached a limit on their earnings by as little as a few pounds a week.

In the days since Patrick Butler broke the story, a number of victims have come forward and told devastating stories of disbelief, shame, and financial ruin. The latest is George Henderson (pictured above), who tells this morning’s Today in Focus podcast that he was forced to sell his home to pay back £20,000 because of ticking the wrong box on a form and making an error worth 30p a week.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) says that it is “protecting the public purse”. But a growing chorus is demanding major reforms to the system – and asking for the debts to be forgiven. Today’s newsletter, with Patrick Butler, is after the headlines.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘These problems could have been headed off if the DWP had put the time and resources into stopping them’

The unpaid carers story is not a new one – but it was supposed to have been fixed years ago. In 2018, Hilary Osborne wrote a story for the Guardian about more than a thousand carers facing fraud prosecutions because the DWP found that they were paid too much – sometimes by a few pounds – to receive a government allowance, but the department let the errors continue for years.

The problems arose after a move to a new system that was supposed to mean overpayments were picked up more efficiently. In 2019, MPs concluded that the vast majority of cases were honest mistakes, and that administrative failures at the DWP were largely to blame. “The DWP basically said, don’t worry, we’ve improved the technology, we’re going to stop this happening,” said Patrick Butler. “But it hasn’t stopped.”

Patrick became aware of the continuing scale of the problem through some time-honoured journalistic methods: a whistleblower, interviews with victims, and scouring local newspapers for court reports. Readers who have contacted him have been quick to pick up on the parallels with the Post Office scandal, he said. “Each injustice has its own special identity,” he said. “But what they have in common is the sense of the little guy being crushed by the vast, impersonal, ruthless state.”

The problem

There are about 5.7 million carers in the UK; most of the unpaid ones are women. About 1 million people claim the carer’s allowance of £81.90 a week. To qualify, carers must provide at least 35 hours of care a week – and if they go above an earnings limit of £151 a week, or 13 hours on minimum wage, they lose the whole sum. Rather than tapering, the money drops off a cliff.

As a result, a small increase in hours, a one-off bonus, or even the uprating of the minimum wage can mean that you are no longer eligible for the allowance. It is the responsibility of the carer – likely to be someone dealing with enormous stress on a low income – to realise if this happens. If they do not, the DWP’s system is supposed to pick up the discrepancy and demand repayment. But in many cases, the DWP fails to investigate for years – and so the debt mounts up. Patrick has a fuller explanation of the details in this Q&A.

“It has been known for a long time that this is a crappy design, that it punishes people,” Patrick said. “But they haven’t done anything about it.”

The costs

“When you talk to anybody about the story, this is the bit where they stop you and say, that’s unbelievable,” Patrick said. Here’s how it works: let’s say a carer goes over the eligibility limit by £1 a week and doesn’t notice. They are immediately ineligible for the entirety of the allowance, which becomes a debt to the DWP. Over a year, their debt is not the £52 annual total by which their income increased – but the accumulated £81.90 a week benefit, or £4,259.

Of course, because there has been so little change in the carer’s income, it is all too easy to miss: this is not a story about benefit cheats brazenly living the high life. And so there are many potential victims. Last year, the DWP was seeking to recover the debts of more than 145,000 people – with about 40,000 owing more than £1,000, and 12,000 owing more than £5,000. A total of 270 owed more than £20,000. In 2022-23 alone, 26,700 carers were asked to make repayments.

The explanation

“It can be tempting to cast the DWP as the evil empire, but it’s not,” Patrick said. “The majority of people working there are just human beings. But it is an insanely rigid system that allows no discretion at all.”

In 2019, the National Audit Office conducted an investigation (PDF) into how the situation had got so bad. It explained that the DWP’s strategy for reducing fraud and error was to match claims against earnings data from HMRC. But it said that the department “has not had enough staff to follow up every case flagged”. It estimated that about two-thirds of debts of more than £2,500 could have been identified more quickly, and therefore been smaller, if enough staff were in place.

There was a warning, too, that the department’s promise to fix the problem with a new system that flagged issues more quickly would in fact produce more work, not less, as 190 cases would need to be processed by each staffer a month, up from 47.

“These problems could have been headed off if the DWP had put the time and resources into stopping them developing,” said Patrick. “They need more staff to process the alerts quickly and stop the debt building up. My feeling is that it’s part incompetence, part resources and part neglect.”

The victims

“One of the key things this story leaves you feeling is just how little value we place on unpaid carers,” said Patrick. “We very rarely talk about the fact that they basically save the NHS and social care system from collapse. And because we don’t value them, nobody ever really thinks about, how do we make their lives a bit easier.”

The case studies to emerge this week, first with Patrick’s story and then from Guardian readers since, are shocking. Vivienne Groom was threatened with a prison term. The £16,000 she inherited from her mother, for whom she cared for years, was seized by the DWP: she was denied legal aid because of the inheritance even when it was frozen. Helen Grater reduced her shifts at Sainsbury’s and claimed the allowance to help care for her partner, Mark Young, after his diagnosis with throat cancer and lung disease. She took on a third shift, slightly exceeded the limit, and wound up with a bill for £5,738.40.

Today’s episode of Today in Focus is about George Henderson, also in Helen Pidd’s article here, who claimed the allowance for his son John, who has learning difficulties and is addicted to heroin. It took the DWP six years to tell George he was claiming incorrectly, and he was convicted of fraud. After he was forced to sell his home to settle the debt, he attempted suicide. Although the DWP has apologised after acknowledging he had probably made an innocent mistake, it has refused to give him any of the money back.

Of all these stories, the detail that has stuck with me is from Helen Grater’s: her belief that she was to blame, and that she was alone. “I felt this was my fault,” she said. “I was shocked to see how many people are going through the same thing. You know you can’t fight it. You don’t have any hope in hell.”

As more cases emerge, pressure is growing on the DWP to pause the debt collections, and to rapidly overhaul its system. There are also calls for large debts to be waived altogether. “There has to be a way to sort this out,” Patrick said. “These are people who are often already in poverty, or near it. The people I’ve spoken to talk about shame, guilt, depression, and panic that their reputation will be torn to shreds. But I’m really heartened by the fact that whenever people read about this, their reaction is outrage. It is such a shocking, and deeply embedded, injustice.”

What else we’ve been reading

• Michael Carlson’s obituary of OJ Simpson, who has died aged 76, is a reminder of how his extraordinary murder trial at the birth of the 24-hour news cycle was the biggest story in the world. Andrew Lawrence examines his strange cultural legacy. And this Washington Post piece reflects on what the trial revealed about racial divisions in America. Archie

• I’m a sucker for fancy footwear (as anyone who has seen my gold-winged Adidas will attest) but this gallery of 11 bizarre shoes from Rome to the modern era has my collection beat. Toby Moses, head of newsletters

• PLEASE don’t ignore this recommendation, [subscriber name] – John Johnston’s piece for Politico about the begging emails from political parties that are likely now clogging up your inbox is an essential guide to the strategy behind making them so unbelievably annoying. Archie

• Margaret Sullivan is as incisive as ever, looking at the fight over abortion rights in Arizona and what that tells us about the Republican party heading into the 2024 election. Toby

• Dungeons & Dragons is a global phenomenon. The tabletop role-playing game is played by millions all over the world, and on its 50th anniversary Keith Stuart traveled to Gary Con, a celebration of co-creator Gary Gygax, which takes place opposite the basement where the game was created. Toby

Sport

Europa League | A thumping 3-0 defeat to Atalanta, their first at home in 34 matches, left Europa League favourites Liverpool needing another stirring comeback to resurrect Jürgen Klopp’s chances of signing off with a Dublin final. On a night of tension and occasional ill-temper, Leverkusen stayed cool and were rewarded with a 2-0 win over West Ham. And Aston Villa beat Lille 2-1 thanks to goals from Ollie Watkins and John McGinn.

The Masters | Bryson DeChambeau holds a one shot lead over Scottie Scheffler after the first day at the Masters. Birdies on the first three holes set the tone for the polarising LIV golf star on a day of play shortened by stormy weather in Augusta.

Football | Sheffield United will start their next Championship season on minus-two points after an English Football League disciplinary commission found they had defaulted on a number of payments to other clubs last season. The side currently sit bottom of the Premier League and are likely to be relegated back to the Championship.

The front pages

The Guardian leads with “Labour warned over loss of urban seats in election”. The i reports “Starmer: Labour will hike UK defence spending amid threat from China and Russia”, while the Mail has “Starmer: UK nuclear deterrent is safe in my hands”. The Financial Times says “Tory election hopes hit as forecasts of interest rate cuts are scaled back”.

The Times looks at hospital patient safety with “Consultants accused of covering up fatal flaws”. The Telegraph reports “Border force ‘to blame’ for fake stamps”. The Mirror leads with “Infamous OJ dead at 76”, while the Sun has the same story with the headline “Good riddance”.

Something for the weekend

Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read and listen to right now

TV
Baby Reindeer Netflix
Never have the words “sent from my iPhone” been so chilling. Baby Reindeer is an adaptation of Richard Gadd’s acclaimed one-man play, which hammered out the horrifying story of his experience of being stalked by a middle-aged woman named Martha, who he meets at the pub where he works. She gets hold of his email address, and starts to message him, incessantly, sometimes coherently, sometimes not, all through the night, every night. The emails end with, “sent from my iPhone”. In the show, Gadd’s alter ego, Donny Dunn, has a realisation: Martha doesn’t have an iPhone. At first, Baby Reindeer is chilling in small instances like this. But as Martha’s behaviour becomes more obsessive, and Donny’s more self-destructive, the two become locked in a terrible downward spiral. This is a self-loathing horror that is relentlessly bleak.
Rebecca Nicholson

Music
Nia Archives: Silence Is Loud
Born Dehaney Nia Lishahn Hunt, Nia Archives (pictured above) counts Goldie among her mentors and seems to occupy a roughly equivalent position in the firmament of “next-gen junglists” – her phrase – as he did in the 90s drum’n’bass scene. On the superb Tell Me What It’s Like?, alt rock and jungle are tightly wound around each other: the lower end continually switches from dive-bombing sub-bass to bass guitar, an acoustic guitar playing a Kashmir-esque riff overlaid with bursts of white noise and poppy synths. The overall effect is not unlike a noticeably more wholesome version of the Prodigy, if you can imagine such a thing. Alexis Petridis

Film
Ratcatcher
Cinemas nationwide
Twenty-five years ago, we saw one of the most impressive debut features in modern British movie history. Ratcatcher, by the 29-year-old Glasgow film-maker Lynne Ramsay, was a visually haunting, passionate piece of work to compare with Terence Davies or Ken Loach and which set a gold standard of artistry for new social realist cinema – or cinema of any sort – in the UK. What is so striking and eerie about this film set in Glasgow during the 13-week bin collectors’ strike of 1975 is Ramsay’s brilliant way of rendering a trance-like, epiphanic child’s-eye-view of a hundred little things that present themselves to James’s senses. But this is not simply a film-making mannerism: it is James’s own sense of dream-like unreality. Peter Bradshaw

Podcast
Split Screen: Kid Nation
Widely available, episodes weekly
Dropping a group of kids aged between eight and 15 into a desolate New Mexico town and getting them to form a society was clearly on the braver side of reality TV commissioning. Now Josh Gwynn’s brilliant podcast tells the story of 2007’s Kid Nation, with all its chicken killing and parental complaints. Hannah Verdier

Today in Focus

Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

Three decades ago, a humble silver bus was transformed into a big screen icon when the low-budget Australian film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert became an Oscar-winning hit. After shooting finished in 1993, however, the bus disappeared, writes Sian Cain. Through the years many claimed they either owned it or knew who owned it, or that they had spotted it somewhere up and down the country.

When a man called Michael Mahon got in touch with the History Trust of South Australia in 2019 claiming Priscilla was sitting on his property in Ewingar, New South Wales (population: 67), no one really believed him. “I’d been here in Ewingar for about six months when I went down to the community hall to say hello to everybody, and they said, ‘G’day! What are you going to do with the bus?’” says Mahon. “I said to the bloke behind the bar, ‘Why is everyone asking me about the bus?’ and he went, ‘That’s Priscilla!’ ‘Strewth,’ I said.”

Fixing up the battered relic will not be cheap. “She’s not in good shape, she’s not been loved and cared for. But she’s very, very salvageable – if you’ve got money to throw at it,” says Paul Rees, head of museums at the History Trust, which is hoping people around the world will help raise A$2.2m to possibly make the bus roadworthy again. “It’s survived flood, fires, 16 years out in the open. But the film is all about survival – and somehow, the bus survived.”

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