IIn 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 suffered from lung disease. He was dying and in dire need of her care.
Ms Grater took unpaid leave from her low-paid job at Sainsbury’s and withdrew £64.80 a week in carer’s allowance to enable her to care full-time.Money – at best she reached £1.85 per hour – I didn’t get to the point where I could pay my bills, but it was better than nothing.
“It was right after his first or second round of chemotherapy. He was very sick. He was in really bad shape, so it was just a matter of having to quit work and be there for him. ” she says.
Eventually, Grater, 55, was able to return to work, working three shifts a week at Sainsbury’s. The rest of the time, she cared for her longtime partner while he underwent grueling chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
Ms Grater didn’t think she needed to tell the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) about her small increase in income because her Universal Credit was automatically reduced.
However, this honest mistake plunged her into a new nightmare. The DWP told her they had fraudulently claimed her carer’s allowance because she had not notified the government that she had started her third shift. She received her bill for £5,738.40.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “You expect a safety net to be there in case you need it. There was a safety net, but [with] There was a big gaping hole and I fell straight down through it. ”
Mr Greater was working low-paid part-time jobs, earning just over the then £120-a-week income limit, which put him over the DWP’s ‘cliff edge’.
Unpaid carers will be forced to pay back their carer’s allowance in full for every week they breach strict income limits, even if it’s £1 more than that. Therefore, for a 26 week offense, the repayment amount would be £2,182 instead of £26.
Ms Greater had to pay back almost two years’ worth of carer’s allowance, even though taking one extra shift a week only put her just over the £120 a week income limit. .
The Guardian reports that tens of thousands of unpaid carers have been hit with stiff fines of more than £20,000 and threatened with criminal prosecution for relatively minor and unintentional breaches of regulations labeled as “cruel and nonsense”. The government is facing calls for a review of the system. .
Young, now 61, was diagnosed as cancer-free two months ago but continues to battle chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). But Mr Grater is furious that taking care of his partner and thereby saving the government money has put him in debt for the first time in his life.
“I’ve never been in trouble with the police before. I’ve never been in debt,” she says.
“When you’re going through something like that, you have enough worries in your head anyway. That’s the last thing you think about.
“Even though my partner finished treatment, he was still very ill. He lost four stone in three months. There’s a lot going on in his head.”
Ms Grater said she begged the DWP to explain why she had paid such a high bill, but only received a response after making a number of frantic phone calls. But there was no possibility of reprieve.
“I said, ‘Can I explain what’s going on without discussing this?’ But they’re just not interested in explaining. What you say is It does not matter.
“They don’t really care. They just want the money. They scam you over and over again and then you give up. It’s totally disgraceful.”
The DWP has technology to identify when a carer’s income has exceeded the threshold, often through a pay rise or a new job. However, as the Guardian revealed this week, less than half of these cases are investigated until much later, with bills running into the thousands of pounds and leaving already struggling carers with a life-threatening situation. can’t be caught.
Ms Grater still blames herself for not telling DWP that she had taken the extra shift. For years, she thought she was the only one caught up in this mess. It wasn’t until this week, when the Guardian newspaper shed light on the ongoing issue, that she realized tens of thousands of others were in the same position.
“I felt like this was my fault. I just wanted to go back and get extra shifts, get off Universal Credit and get my payments back into the system,” she says.
“I was shocked to see so many people going through similar experiences,” she says. “You know you can’t fight it. There’s no hope in hell. No one’s listening to you. They just weren’t interested.”
Furthermore, she added: “Next time I’m not going to take care of anybody. The government can do that. I was trying to save the government money and do the right thing. Reports of companies raising billions in funding. When you see this in the newspaper, you might think, “Are they serious?” ”
A DWP spokesperson said: “We are striving for fairness in the welfare system by putting safeguards in place to manage repayments while protecting public funds.
“The plaintiff has a responsibility to notify DWP of any changes in circumstances that may affect the award, and it is right to recover taxpayers’ money where that has not happened.”
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