A vulnerable unpaid carer threatened by benefits officials with prosecution for fraud unless she agreed to pay a £1,300 penalty for an accidental breach of carer’s allowance earnings rules has described her experience as “like blackmail”.
Clemency Jacques, a carer for her disabled son, was told by Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) investigators her case would be referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) unless she paid a 50% charge on top of an existing agreement to repay £2,600 in carer’s allowance overpayments – a total of £3,900.
Jacques, 43, a former NHS psychologist who cares for her severely disabled son and frail elderly mother, said she was threatened with prosecution even though the DWP accepted she had made an “unintentional error”.
Her treatment was condemned as a “disgrace” and “inhumane” by politicians and campaigners amid growing concern over the DWP’s policy of prosecuting – or threatening with prosecution – carers who unwittingly breach carer’s allowance benefit earnings rules by relatively minor amounts.
“Agreeing to the administrative penalty feels more like blackmail than an actual choice. It’s like: ‘Say how naughty you have been and pay us a large chunk of money or we will send you to court and punish you for being a stressed-out carer,’” Jacques said.
The Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, who is a carer for his disabled teenage son, said: “The fact the government is forcing carers to chose between an expensive fine or a criminal record, just for making an innocent mistake, is a disgrace.
“This is all part of the legacy left to Labour by the Conservative party, who failed carers again and again and treated them like criminals.”
The DWP said it was reviewing Jacques’s case “as a matter of urgency”.
The government last month promised a wider review of carer’s allowance following a Guardian investigation that revealed that tens of thousands of unpaid carers were repaying more than £250m in overpayments that in many cases had been allowed to accumulate because of years of DWP administrative failures.
Carer’s allowance, worth £81.90 a week, is claimed by just under a million unpaid carers in the UK who look after disabled, frail and ill loved ones for at least 35 hours a week. Most are women and a high proportion are in poverty.
Jacques’s case was taken up earlier this year by her then MP, Caroline Lucas, who asked the DWP to review its decision. Lucas described Jacques’s treatment by officials as “disproportionate and inhumane” and argued they had failed to take into account “the exceptional and extenuating circumstances” of her situation.
Jacques, a single mother, said at the time of the overpayments she was overwhelmed by looking after her severely disabled toddler son, Alex, who had been born prematurely and needed constant care, while also caring for her mother who had Alzheimer’s. Jacques herself had post-traumatic stress related to birth complications and was attempting to move back into work after maternity leave.
Responding to Lucas in May, the DWP complaints team stood by its decision, saying it had followed the correct processes and taken “reasonable, necessary and proportionate” actions. It said it was not its intention “to cause claimants any undue distress” but had a “responsibility to protect public funds and preserve public trust”.
Jacques told the Guardian she had been “petrified” by the DWP’s treatment of her for what she said was an unwitting oversight made during a period when she was under extreme stress. “What is most frustrating is that I didn’t claim fraudulently. I was most definitely a carer twice over. I didn’t fake or overstate my situation,” she said.
Under carer’s allowance earnings rules, claimants must pay back the entire £81.90 a week benefit if they earn more than the £151 a week earnings limit, even by a penny. These have been criticised as “perverse”, plunging carers into financial hardship and ill health after they unwittingly ran up huge overpayments.
In Jacques’s case, the DWP would have been alerted immediately by HMRC that she had returned to paid work and was earning above the limit, but it did not act, allowing her overpayments to build to a size where prosecution for fraud became a possibility.
The Guardian can reveal the DWP has levied more than £5m in additional fines on thousands of carers in the past four years relating to earnings rule breaches, on top of clawing back at least £250m in carer’s allowance overpayments.
These comprise £420,000 from administrative penalties such as the one paid by Jacques – 225 claimants have paid these since 2020 to prevent their case from being passed to the CPS – and £4.8m in more routine civil penalties of £50, levied on at least 98,000 carers deemed to have breached earnings rules over the same four-year period.
Dominic Carter, the director of policy at Carers Trust, said: “Sadly, we have heard of plenty of examples like this. It’s frustrating that so many carers continue to fall foul of a system not fit for the present day. Carers shouldn’t be made to feel like criminals, they should be recognised for the contribution they make to society and to the taxpayer.”
Katy Styles, the founder of We Care Campaign, a grassroots network for unpaid carers, said: “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?”
Official data shows that 119 carer’s allowance cases have gone to court in the last two years after being referred to the CPS by the DWP. A trawl through local newspaper reports and court data suggests scores of unpaid carers have criminal records after being prosecuted for inadvertent earnings-related breaches.