"They fob you off' The carer DWP fined £6,000 for a tiny mistake

In the spring of 2018, Helen Grater's world began to fall apart. Her partner, Mark Young, then 55, had been diagnosed with throat cancer. He also had lung disease. He was dying and desperately needed her care.

- Josh Halliday

Grater took unpaid leave from her low-paid job at Sainsbury's and drew £64.80 a week in carer's allowance so she could look after him full time. The money - which, at most, amounted to £1.85 an hour - didn't come close to paying the bills, but it was better than nothing.

"It was just after his first or second chemo. He was so ill. He was really in a bad way, so it was just a case of needing to stop working and being there for him," she says.

Eventually, Grater, 55, was able to return to work and did three shifts a week at Sainsbury's. The rest of the time she cared for her long-term partner as he underwent gruelling rounds of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Grater believed she did not need to tell the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) about her modest increase in earnings because her universal credit had been reduced automatically.

Yet this honest mistake plunged her into a fresh nightmare: the DWP told her she had been fraudulently claiming carer's allowance by failing to notify the government she had taken on a third shift. It landed her with a bill for £5,738.40.

"I couldn't believe it," she says. "You expect a safety net to be there for when you call on it. There was a safety net but [with] a huge, gaping hole in it which I fell straight through."

Grater had exceeded the then earnings limit of £120 a week by only a small amount with her low-paid, part-time job, but it had pushed her over the DWP's "cliff edge".