Karen Seymour, Mansfield Socialist Party
A Guardian investigation has found that scores of carers are being forced to repay huge sums because they unwittingly fell foul of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)’s draconian benefit rules.
Carers’ Allowance is £81.90 a week and is awarded for providing 35 hours or more of care for one person. This could include things like taking someone to a hospital appointment, managing finances or doing housework. You can earn £151 per week working after tax and expenses, but 50p or more over and the whole of the week’s allowance for the entire period breached must be repaid.
As a result, some carers have amassed huge debts, and, in some cases, been given criminal records or forced to sell their homes. This is despite the DWP having real-time technology for years which could have picked up minor infringements.
Unpaid carers, who save the government £160 billion a year, are being treated as thieves for honest mistakes.
A parliamentary investigation looked at this issue as early as 2019. Three former Conservative work and pensions secretaries, including Iain Duncan-Smith – the architect of hated Universal Credit – have appealed to the government to suspend probes of unpaid carers. With breathtaking hypocrisy, they have called the government’s approach a “scandalous miscarriage of justice”!
There have been calls for Carers’ Allowance to be raised to the level of the minimum wage, currently at £11.44 an hour, for 35 hours a week. Labour has promised a review of the benefit. However, as it is obsessed with economic prudence, this is likely to be tinkering at the edges, with only minor simplifications instead of implementing a shift to a fair benefits system.
The Socialist Party says: End the persecution of unpaid carers! We need a welfare state that is a proper safety net alongside a fully funded social care system and NHS, and a minimum wage of at least £15 an hour without exemptions, as a first step to pay we can live on. A mass new workers’ party, rooted in the trade unions, with a bold socialist programme, would fight for working-class people on these issues and more.
