Something went very wrong

How the care crisis was exposed at last

- Patrick Butler and Josh Halliday

One February afternoon in 2016, Sir Robert Devereux, at the time the most powerful official in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), was stopped by a junior colleague as he walked through the car park of a civil service office in Preston, Lancashire. Was he aware, the worker asked, about the problems with carer's allowance? Devereux, on a flying visit to the DWP outpost, asked for details and promised to look into it. A few days later his office received a long and detailed note, complete with 80 anonymised case studies, setting out how years of shortcomings in the administration of the carer's allowance benefit had wasted millions of pounds of taxpayer's money and inflicted untold hardship and misery on thousands of unpaid carers.

Enrico La Rocca, a civil servant based in Preston's carer's allowance unit, wrote: "I have raised this issue many times with management up to directorate level and I have been consistently disappointed and depressed by the lack of will to improve things. I hope you will be able to put this right."

La Rocca's warnings centred on the issue of carer's allowance overpayments. The benefit is paid to about 1 million unpaid carers - people who carry out the arduous and demanding task of providing round the clock care for frail, sick or disabled loved ones. It is Britain's lowest value benefit, worth £83.30 per week.

Those who claim it are allowed to work part-time, but there is a strict limit on how much they can earn - if they earn a single penny over that limit, £196 per week, their entire benefit is considered to be an overpayment, a debt which is then owed to the DWP.

This so-called "cliff-edge" means a carer who earned £1 more than the threshold for 52 weeks would pay back not £52 but £4,258.80. The effect had created a debt trap, and La Rocca could see thousands of people falling into it.