News: Carers Allowance Overpayments

Can you get your head around these facts?

Dear Readers

This won’t be a tidy article because the fire in my belly is raging.

Carers in the UK are now seen as fraudsters, ‘owing the government’ repayments of Carers Allowance. Can you get your head around these facts?

Bottom lines:

• On an assumption, you have the emotional capacity and can find a way for your loved one to be okay whilst you’re away.

• IF you care for 35 hours, you’re eligible to get Carers Allowance (£81.90) and can work to receive up to £151.

• IF you go a few pence over £151 (after tax expenses), you forfeit one hundred per cent of the £81.90.

• BUT this ‘debt’ to the benefits department stacks up over time because you’re not informed. For example, the £81.90 per week racks up to £11k, in Henry’s case below.

Case study - Henry

Henry cares for his wife. He went over the earnings threshold within the last few years and had an overpayment of £11,000. When Henry got a new job, he notified the DWP Universal Credit unit and was told he didn’t need to do anything more. However, he was later notified that he had to pay back an overpayment which he felt was “so wrong on so many levels…I was ashamed and felt like a criminal.” Henry asked to pay back the lowest amount possible, which he can “just about afford” to pay. (Carers UK Report)

Wage + Carer’s Allowance: £81.90 + £151 = £232.9 for 35 hours caring and 13 hours paid work , that’s £4.85/hour. This is below the national living wage - anyone over 21 years of age, gets £11.44/hour 2024/5 data.

SO someone working is paid at the higher national living wage rate because, wouldn’t you know it, a salaried income is economically more valuable than caring for a loved one at home?

SO, the unpaid carer has to reduce their ‘working hours’ to stay within the ‘limit’ of £151.

Don’t forget this is not about like-for-like work. The unpredictability of unpaid caring appointments, paperwork, chasing prescriptions, and hands-on caring exhausts and emotionally drains caregivers daily, 24/7. It is not a 9-to-5 situation or circumstance. It’s impossible to plan when someone has unpredictable symptoms.

SO, now people like Henry are repaying the ‘debt’ back to the government and feeling like they’re labelled as ‘criminals and fraudsters’ by people checking boxes?

• the value of carers’ support is worth a staggering £162 billion per year, yet many carers are struggling financially.

• The rate of poverty for those in receipt of Carer’s Allowance has doubled in a decade¹ and unpaid carers are increasingly struggling to make ends meet as well as being able to meet basic costs, such as food and energy²

So unpaid carers (this is not my label; it is the government label to normalise family and friends doing the caring versus a salaried carer) are filling the gap of a second NHS carers (ie saving the government £162 billion per year) and now need to give what little they have back to the government. Marginalised as unpaid carers and now vilified as fraudsters.

I’m angry at how this could be happening to caregivers in the UK and deeply concerned for carers who are now in debt and pushed further into depression.

Please read the information and Carers UK’s report on Carer’s Allowance overpayments.

With the recent government change, there may be a glimmer of light and hope in Emily Holzhausen’s email news that I received this morning.

Worth noting: Charities must tread a fine line with every statement they make to push for change with the government. I continue to be impressed by the Carers UK work.

If you or someone you know needs support, please call The Carers UK telephone Helpline is available at 0808 808 7777 from Monday to Friday, 9am – 6pm (excluding Bank Holidays), or you can contact them by email (advice@carersuk.org).

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The email I received

Emily Holzhausen CBE, Director of Policy and Public Affairs of Carers UK

I wanted to share a copy of Carers UK’s report on Carer’s Allowance overpayments, published today. 

This is an issue Carers UK has been campaigning on for some time, and we are really pleased that Sir Stephen Timms, Minister for Social Security and Disabilities, has agreed to our request to meet with Carers UK and a group of unpaid carers later today to hear first-hand from them about their experiences. 

As many of you will be aware, the earnings limit for Carer’s Allowance is £151 per week, and going over this limit by just a few pence means carers need to pay back 100% of their Carer’s Allowance for that week - £81.90 at 2024/25 rate.³

Large overpayments have a devastating impact on unpaid carers. News of the overpayment also often comes as a shock to most carers and takes many years to repay, causing financial difficulties and having a serious impact on their mental health and wellbeing. We also found that many carers decided to leave employment altogether or cut back on their hours as a result of the overpayment.

Carers UK’s recommendations to the DWP include: 

• Sending alerts to carers when their earnings potentially breach the earnings limit 

• Improving information sharing and processes within the DWP 

• Improving the information available to carers and their interaction with DWP 

• Raising the Carer’s Allowance earnings limit to 21 hours per week and pegging it to the National Living Wage 

• Taking steps to remove the hard ‘cliff edge’ of the earnings limit and replacing this with a taper to earnings 

• Writing off substantial overpayments where carers could have been notified sooner 

• Conducting a full review of Carer’s Allowance level and its eligibility criteria   

We are continuing to gather the experiences of carers who have had an overpayment of Carer’s Allowance and they can be shared with us anonymously. If this is you, then please click here.   

If you are worried about overpayments and Carer’s Allowance, please look at the advice on our website.

We are grateful to the Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales for providing a grant to Carers UK to work to address the issue of overpayments of Carer’s Allowance and the earnings threshold.

Kind regards,

Emily Holzhausen CBE

Director of Policy and Public Affairs

Carers UK

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Direct Excerpts taken from the report by Victoria :

The main reason for an overpayment is earnings over the Carer’s Allowance limit, making up over two thirds (70%) of cases.⁴ The earnings threshold is set at £151 (2024/25) per week after deduction of tax, 50% of pension contributions and other allowable expenses. If the carer is even a few pence over this limit, they lose 100% of their Carer’s Allowance which is currently £81.90 per week in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

What has changed in the past five years? The National Living Wage has risen faster than the earnings limit, thereby reducing carers’ ability to participate in paid work alongside their caring role. This also means that with every National Living Wage increase in recent years carers have had to make an active decision to reduce their working hours or to leave paid work altogether. Over the last five years, the number of hours carers have been able to work earning the National Living Wage, while also receiving Carer’s Allowance, has shrunk from just under 15 hours a week in 2019 to just over 13 hours and 12 minutes from April 2024 (Unpaid carers in employment forced to reduce their working hours for the fifth consecutive year as Carer Poverty Coalition publishes its demands of government. 21 March 2024)

In 2019, the Work and Pensions Select Committee inquiry into overpayments of Carer’s Allowance found that “administrative failings” by the DWP had led to substantial overpayments.

A National Audit Office (NAO) report in 2019 found that DWP staffing levels in the past were not adequate to deal with overpayments quickly enough.

Two-thirds of carers with earnings-related overpayments of more than £2,500 could have had been notified sooner if the DWP had had sufficient staff in place. More recently, DWP stated in a response to a Parliamentary Question that only around half of the number of overpayments flagged by the Verified Earning and Pension (VEP) system had been reviewed by the DWP.

In May 2024, the DWP published a strategy document about tackling fraud in the welfare system. In this, the DWP said that it is progressing “an enhanced notification strategy” as part of its existing commitment to improve customer engagement. This strategy will consider ways of notifying carers at risk of overpayments, such as sending targeted text messages or emails to alert claimants and encourage them to contact the DWP about potential overpayments. However, no timeline has been provide for this work.

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P.S. I’ll keep you updated on this news. This is starting to feel a little like the Post-Office-Scandal. New government, new policies?

Please care for the caregivers: sit with the loved one, pick up a prescription, drive them to an appointment. We can help each other

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Articles I published in Carers Week:

'Care in the UK. 10 Facts Which Shock'

UK: Carers Allowance. Attendance Allowance

Carers UK: 'Planning ahead, helping a loved one'

1. Joseph Rowntree Foundation, UK Poverty 2023: The essential guide to understanding poverty in the UK, 2023.

2. Carers UK, State of Caring 2023 report on finances, 2023.

3. Victoria’s insert: Wage + Carer’s Allowance (£81.90 + £151 = £232.9 for 35 hours) is below the national living wage (£6.65/hour versus £11.44/hour) 2024/5 data. Don’t forget this is not about like-for-like work; the unpredictability of appointments, paperwork, chasing prescriptions AND hands-on caring exhausts and emotionally drains caregivers daily, 24/7. It is not a 9 to 5 situation or circumstance. It’s impossible to plan when someone has unpredictable symptoms

4. https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2024-04-24/23453/