For unpaid carers, a repayment should bring relief. Instead, the prospect of redress has become a wait that may stretch for decades.
The Department for Work and Pensions is reviewing 200,000 cases in which recipients of carer’s allowance were wrongly issued with overpayment bills. Around 25,000 carers could ultimately qualify for a full or partial refund. Yet Carers UK warns that, at the pace cases are currently being handled, the process may not finish until 2054.
A correction delayed by decades
The reassessment began in April as part of a £75m programme. So far, 3,000 cases have been examined, amounting to just 1.5% of the projected caseload. Carers UK calculates that maintaining this rate would leave people waiting 27 years for an answer.
Welfare minister Stephen Timms told MPs last week that the department remained on course to complete the work within its previously announced three-year timetable. Carers UK, however, cannot yet confirm whether anyone has received a refund. At the current pace, some recipients could die or become difficult to trace after stopping their claims before the department reaches them.
The scale of the delay is stark: a correction designed to repair unlawful overpayments is itself becoming another source of uncertainty. For carers already living under financial pressure, each month without clarity can mean another month of anxiety, debt and unanswered questions.
How carers were pushed into debt
A formal review found widespread failures in the way the DWP assessed earnings. Some carers worked irregular hours in part-time jobs, but officials did not properly allow their income to be averaged over a year. Instead, temporary fluctuations could make their earnings appear to exceed the benefit’s limits, even when their annual pay was lawful.
The result was
