The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is pursuing prosecution and investigating claimants under caution following unintentional violations.
Benefit Claimant Faces Penalty and Prosecution Threat Over Allowance Error
Clemency Jacques was interrogated under caution and accepted to settle the penalty for an error that could have been detected earlier.
“I sat there for two hours crying,” she claimed to the Guardian newspaper, adding that officials read her her rights “just like in the movies” throughout an interview at a Jobcentre. The woman was warned that she may risk police arrest, submission to the Crown Prosecution Service, and a court hearing.
The 43-year-old woman, who cares for her physically disabled son and her very old mother, learnt that she violated carer's allowance earnings guidelines and had been overpaid £2,600 over 10 months, thereby infringing DWP rules.
She stated: “I apologised and said it was a complete mistake. But the interview process is designed to be as cold and dehumanising as possible, focusing on trying to prove my guilt, trying to catch me out with every statement I made.”
“So I was lucky,” she added. “They had decided to be more lenient on me, and I was given the ‘opportunity’ to sign a bit of paper admitting my guilt and agreeing to pay an administrative penalty of 50% of the overpayment.”
She noted: “I didn’t want to do this, I shouldn’t have had to do this, but I was petrified of their threat to prosecute me and my life being ruined by getting a criminal record for fraud.” The DWP asserted it was examining Jacques’s case “as a matter of urgency”.
“I wish I had never applied for carer’s allowance in the first place,” she states. “The system unfairly punishes carers, it knows it does, and it doesn’t care.”
Katy Styles, the founder of the We Care Campaign, a network dedicated to supporting unpaid carers, stated: “Threatening to criminalise unpaid carers over genuine and understandable errors related to carer’s allowance earnings rules is a disproportionate response, and it’s shocking that we continue to hear these stories. Where is the compassion?”
Carer's Allowance Scandal: Unpaid Carers Face Heavy Penalties and Threats from DWP
According to a Guardian investigation, Jacques is one of thousands of unpaid carers who are penalised by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) carer's allowance system. The issue stems from “cliff edge” earnings rules, which require carers to repay the entire £81.90 weekly allowance if they exceed a weekly earnings limit of £151.
A caretaker who received £1 above the threshold for 52 weeks would be required to repay £4,258.80 rather than £52. Some are also being charged for fraud.
According to the most recent figures, 134,500 unpaid carers handed back £251 million in earnings-related overpayments last year, with 11,500 of them owing £5,000 or more.
Critics claim the DWP was careless in failing to take appropriate action on its own information, which detects overpayments right away.
Jacques's experience sheds light on an extremely disputable aspect of the carer's allowance controversy: the DWP policy of threatening to charge some unpaid carers who violate earnings rules, and then giving them the option of paying large fines — known as administrative penalties — in exchange for dropping legal charges.