Calls to axe 'cruel' fines levied on unpaid carers

Ministers are facing calls to abandon the "cruel and nonsensical" fines levied on tens of thousands of unpaid carers for unwittingly breaching earnings rules by just a few pounds a week.

- Josh Halliday, Patrick Butler, Aletha Adu

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a centre-right thinktank, said the government should end the "persecution" of carers and accept it was to blame for allowing overpayments to rise to huge sums, in some cases more than £20,000.

The Guardian revealed how carers were being plunged into hardship after being forced to pay penalties over a benefits snag the government promised to fix five years ago.

It can also now be revealed that ministers are refusing to publish the findings of an official study into the emotional and financial impact of the fines levied by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Cristina Odone, the CSJ's head of family policy, called the punishment "cruel and nonsensical" and urged "wholesale reform" of the system.

"I'd like to hear [the DWP] say that they are going to forget about the debts," she said. "Rather than prosecute and persecute, they should say 'we understand that these are honest mistakes, we have allowed them to accumulate and that's our fault and therefore we will redeem them'."

The breaches of carer's allowance earnings limits - found by an MPs' inquiry to be mostly carer's "honest mistakes" involving small sums, rather than intentional fraud - has led to carers being forced to repay debts of thousands of pounds, prosecuted for fraud, and having homes and inheritances seized by the DWP.

The DWP should be able to identify when a carer's earnings have exceeded the £151-a-week limit and notify them - but in many cases the government fails to do so, meaning people unwittingly rack up debts.