Cristina Odone is the Head of Family Policy Unit at the Centre for Social Justice.
Innocent citizens accused of fraud. Victims battling for years, sometimes decades, with a remote and unresponsive bureaucracy. A flawed IT system.
Echoes of the Post Office scandal are inevitable in the Kafkaesque world inhabited by family carers in receipt of Carers Allowance. By claiming the modest (£76.75 a week until this month) benefit when they had – for the most part unwittingly – tipped over the earnings threshold of £139 a week, thousands had fallen foul of the DWP.
What ensued was a miscarriage of justice that merits its own ITV series.
Hats off to the whistle-blower who tipped tipped off the Guardian about this scandal. Hats off also to the MPs who, both in 2019 and more recently in the Work and Pensions Select Committee, challenged the DWP to stop its disproportionate reaction to small infringements and focus instead on overhauling its IT system, which failed to update carers when they had gone over their earnings threshold.
Some, for years, kept receiving the full Carers Allowance when they were no longer entitled to it – and then were presented with a bill of the accumulated benefit. This amounted to thousands of pounds in some cases, spelling ruin for many (almost half of CA claimants live in poverty).
I gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Select Committee in March. MPs understood what the Department clearly failed to see: that the overwhelming majority of these selfless carers were guilty of honest mistakes, easily made when trying to navigate the complexity of the adult social care system.
Moreover, even the biggest debt that any individual carer could owe the DWP is dwarfed by the savings they deliver rest of us. Consider just the cost of a council care home: on average over £900 pounds a week, that’s more than £50k a year. According to Carers UK, by reducing the pressure on social care and the NHS, carers are saving the taxpayer a cool £162 billion.
Instead of being treated like criminals, family carers merit our gratitude: their unstinting devotion to a spouse with dementia, or an adult son with severe disabilities, fuels them. The ones eligible for Carers Allowance work more than 35 hours a week administering medicine, attending to personal hygiene needs, doing the shopping, and organising GP visits, all out of love and a sense of duty.
For even the most devoted, their 24/7 caring role takes its toll. There is little respite (most LAs can’t afford to offer more than a few days a month) but also a great risk of loneliness, poor health, and poverty. Holding down paid employment becomes crucial, offering a sense of identity (other than as a vulnerable person’s guardian angel) and a bit of security.
This is why the CSJ framed our report, Creating a Britain that Works and Cares, in terms of the current crisis of economic inactivity. If the Treasury wants to reduce the number (now more than nine million) who are neither in paid employment nor seek to be, a good place to start is with working-age carers.
Our survey with Opinium found that 41 per cent of family carers holding down a paid job are considering reducing their hours or leaving that job altogether within the next year because of their caring responsibilities. Yet, unlike so many others, two-thirds of those currently not in work would like to go back into the labour market – if only they could receive a little more support.
We thus came up with (and costed) some policy solutions to meet carers’ needs, as per our survey.
Our first recommendation sought to address the extraordinarily complex system that has turned adult social care into a maze in which frustrated carers lose time, energy, and heart. Benefits and entitlements, digital forms and official letters… no wonder the take up on some benefits, such as Attendance Allowance, is so low.
We proposed a One Stop Shop for Carers, set up in major hospitals and GP surgeries – which is where most family members learn that they are henceforth carers for a relative.
Major hospitals could fund this through the NHS Apprenticeship Levy. In GP surgeries, it would be run by social prescribing link workers. One Stop Shops would facilitate data sharing across an ICS, helping to progress the integration of health and social care.
We also recommended, given our survey finding that 40 per cent of carers out of the labour market would go back if their dependent relative could receive free domiciliary care, that government should deliver ten hours free domiciliary care a week to the ten per cent adults with most needs.
Based on estimates from the Homecare Association, assuming pay at the National Living Wage, the minimum total cost of such care would be around £26 per hour once other costs are factored in (e.g.travel time and expenses, training costs and management costs). The total cost per person would therefore be around £13,520 per annum.
If this free care were offered to the ten per cent of adults with the most serious needs, it would be provided to people being looked after by around 350,000 unpaid carers of working age in England, according to 2021 Census results; Based on the above assumptions, the estimated annual cost of this policy would be around £4.7bn.
Based on survey results, scaled to reflect English population estimates, ten hours of free domiciliary care would increase employment by around 43,000, while around 15,000 unpaid carers already working would be able to increase their hours of work from part-time to full-time.
The policy could boost GDP by around £1.5bn, offsetting just under a third of the total cost of delivering ten hours of free domiciliary care.
In terms of the fiscal analysis, the offsetting tax revenues and benefit savings for unpaid carers supported to work more would add up to an estimated £700m, reducing the net cost to the public finances to around £4bn per annum. In addition, supporting care at home has been shown to reduce demand for (more expensive) residential care.
The paltry Carers Allowance, as of April raised to £81.80 per week, only allows the recipient to earn up to £151 per week – surely a perverse disincentive to work. We suggested that the Carers Allowance earnings limit should be raised to £250 per week; and Carers Allowance for non-dependent adults increased by £5 per week and that for dependent adults increased by proportionately equivalent amount (a little under £3 per week).
By raising the earnings limit to £250 per week, 270,000 additional working age carers in disability and incapacity related benefits become eligible for Carers Allowance across the UK. Our proposal would have seen an increase of the award by £5 per week for non-dependent adults and by the equivalent proportional rise for dependent ones. This would apply to all 1.15m claimants (this includes the 270,000 new claimants) now on the benefit.
There was an indirect assumption, based on polling, that of those working below 16 hours around 15 per cent move into 16 hours of work at National Minimum Wage (NMW), of those working above 16 and below 21 hoursrs some 15 per cent move into 21 hours of work at NMW, and of those working above 21 hours about 11 per cent move to 36 hours of work at NMW.
The result of raising the earnings threshold and increasing the award by five pounds is that the cost to the Exchequer of the new Carers Allowance (and the non means tested benefits expenditure of which it is a subset) would rise to about £950m; however, over £500m is lost in the interaction with lower receipts of means tested benefits, tax credits and Universal Credit. This leaves extra welfare spend at circa £400m (in 2021-22 prices).
As a result of more people getting into work, there is an increase of £80m across Income Tax and National Insurance (in 2021-22 prices). This means net fiscal cost-benefit in-year is within £300-£340m (in 2021-22 prices).
The DWP persecuted thousands of poor (literally) carers for every last penny. The relentless campaign to claw back the money owed turned lives that were already challenging into out and out misery. It can now go some way to make amends by delivering more support to these unsung heroes – before the sorry saga of the Carers Allowance Persecution is turned into a TV series where they are the bad guys.
The post Cristina Odone: Ministers must deliver justice for carers – before they become the new postmasters appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Cristina Odone
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.