Why is the Labour Party Still Going After Unpaid Carers?

It is safe to say that Labour’s first year in power hasn’t exactly gone to plan. Cratering in the opinion polls, a Parliamentary Party in open revolt over proposed disability benefit cuts, and a Chancellor in literal tears following a screeching U-Turn, anniversaries rarely come any bleaker.

But any feelings of despair felt on the government front benches pales in comparison to the misery that has been inflicted on hundreds of thousands of this country’s most overworked and under-appreciated group - Britain’s unpaid carers. 

A 2021 survey estimated that there were 5.8 million unpaid carers in the UK. Put simply, a carer is anybody who looks after a family member, partner or friend who needs extra support in dealing with an illness, disability, addiction or other health problem. Their vital work is stressful and emotionally taxing. It is also, crucially, unpaid. 

While carers go without pay, they are entitled to claim carer’s allowance, a benefit worth at most just £83.30 a week. Hardly enough to live on, but enough to supplement a carer’s income and help adjust to the demands of providing care to a loved one. 

As with most benefits, and with the usual commentary from the right-wing tabloids notwithstanding, eligibility is strict. Carer’s allowance is not means-tested, but to be eligible, carers must provide 35 hours of care and cannot earn more than £196 a week. 

Crucially, if a carer earns even £1 more than this amount in a week, they must repay the full amount they were entitled to for that week. A carer’s effective fine in this instance, despite only breaching the maximum earnings threshold by £1, would be £83.30. Extended to a full year, this fine would rise to £4331.60. It’s a system that’s quite rightly been described as a ‘cliff-edge’, disincentivising carers from taking on extra hours at work, and forcing already struggling, unsuspecting families into making brutal repayments. 

It’s a crisis that has been allowed by consecutive Tory and now Labour governments to metastasise into a full-blown scandal. Over £357 million has been overpaid to carers in the last six years, burdening them with arbitrary and often unforeseen debt mountains.

The Guardian newspaper has provided award-winning coverage of the families who have suffered during the carer’s allowance scandal for years. Their stories are truly heartbreaking. One family received a letter from the Government’s Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) last Christmas stating they had to repay £10,130.45. This was despite only breaching the earnings threshold by an average of £1.92 a week.

In another case, a carer had her £16,000 inheritance given to her by her late mother, whom she had cared for, seized after the government cruelly reneged on a deal for her to repay the amount she had been overpaid in weekly instalments. 

Unpaid carers have been failed by the state twice. They have been failed by a system that appears to be rigid and inflexible by design. They have also been failed by government officials, who have failed to enforce this flawed system properly. 

Thousands of carers have been allowed by the Department for Work and Pensions to rack up years' worth of carer's allowance overpayments without warning. This is despite DWP having access to carers' tax records and therefore knowing, after one paycheck alone, that a carer may be in breach. 

Though they might like to, DWP cannot plead ignorance. Since 2018, DWP have been alerted by the UK’s tax authorities to every single incidence where carer's allowance had been overpaid. Up until recently, however, the department has only acted on 50% of these cases seemingly at random, allowing debt to accrue in the tens of thousands of pounds over multiple years in a system that amounts to little more than a perverse lottery.

Though it is right to criticise the overall response, it would be unfair not to point out recent positive measures adopted by the Government. The recent uplift in the maximum earnings threshold from £151 to £196, for instance, is welcome. So too is the decision to tie this threshold to the National Living Wage (NLW) so that carers on the UK’s minimum salary are not punished for the mortal sin of getting a pay rise.

It’s a step in the right direction from the last Conservative government, who, in their infinite wisdom, decided it was prudent policy to increase the NLW without uplifting carers allowance by the same rate, tipping thousands of carers over the paltry earnings threshold and making them ineligible for the benefit in the process. 

The Labour Party would say that they have taken substantial enough steps to alleviate the concerns of carers, and that the carer's allowance scandal was just one in a litany of crises left by the recent conservative government. Though the latter is undoubtedly true, the former most certainly isn’t.

There are measures the Labour party refuses to take that it should. With an independent review into carers' overpayments scheduled to report this summer, Labour could have written off the debt that has been dragging these families further into a financial abyss. 

Failing that, they could have at least announced a moratorium on pursuing debt repayments from carers until the review has published its recommendations. Instead, Labour’s top brass have opted for half measures, tinkering around the edges of an already unworkable system rather than pursuing the kind of meaningful change they were elected to pursue. 

It has become the familiar tale of Labour’s first year in office. An unambitious leadership pursuing unambitious policies while the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable continue to worsen. The UK’s children’s commissioner has recently spoken of the ‘Dickensian levels of poverty’ Britain's children face. Undoubtedly, many carers and their families would fall into the same bracket.

A Labour Party that won’t legislate to take children out of poverty and continues to mercilessly pursue unpaid carers is hardly a Labour party worth voting for. 

Unpaid carers don’t do what they do because they expect to ever be fairly compensated. They do what they do out of selfless devotion to their family and loved ones. Perhaps the Labour Party should take note.

Illustration by Will Allen/Europinion