The Guardian view on supporting carers: the DWP’s problem is deeper than IT

A taper is much better than a cliff-edge. But problems with carer’s allowance should have been solved years ago

The reform of carer’s allowance – a benefit paid to people who spend 35 or more hours a week caring for a disabled relative – is overdue and welcome. The cliff-edge design that forces claimants in England and Wales to forfeit their entire payment if they breach an earnings limit of £204 a week by as little as a penny is wrong in principle and made much worse by the appalling way in which rules have been applied.

A Guardian investigation revealed that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) failed to warn thousands of people who it knew were being overpaid. This resulted in debts and hardship, and hundreds of criminal convictions for fraud. Carers in already difficult personal circumstances described feeling driven to desperation and illness by what one called a “catch-out culture”. Most claimants are women on low incomes; the allowance is £86.45 a week.

The plan to replace this outdated, blunt tool with a taper is a good one. The disincentive to employment built into the existing system is perverse. Adults with caring responsibilities should be encouraged to do paid work in addition to their roles at home if they can. As with child benefit, the promised taper will mean that earnings over the threshold lead to a diminution rather than a loss of the allowance. Demands for repayment should be drastically reduced. Thousands of low-income households with disabled members will gain more freedom as a result.

Details of the policy’s implementation have yet to be set out. But after years of delay and inaction, the main concern is timing. A DWP whistleblower first raised the overpayment issue a decade ago, only for their complaint to be shut down. Successive Conservative governments did nothing despite a detailed 2020 report from the work and pensions committee. Finally, last November, Liz Sayce’s independent review led to the recruitment of extra staff and a new approach. Ministers committed to correcting past errors, including the way that claimants had been unlawfully blocked from averaging their earnings. But progress has been slow, and with the taper expected to be rolled out in 2030-31, the injustice of the current situation looks set to continue for several more years.

The benefit system is complicated, and it is better to make changes properly than to rush through a botched job. But the overhaul of carer’s allowance should not be mistaken for an IT problem. The deeper issue is the ongoing failure to get to grips with the fundamental challenge of care in our society, and to take on board the extent to which millions of people’s lives are shaped by the needs of dependent adult relatives.

Louise Casey has made it clear that her social care commission will deliver recommendations about what it is reasonable to expect of families, as well as the state. There are grounds to hope that her forthright style and years of experience, combined with Andy Burnham’s strong commitment to reform, will finally lead to a breakthrough. In the meantime, the DWP must do all it can to put right the wrongs done to carer’s allowance claimants. There has still been no satisfactory explanation about how such a punitive culture developed. But the new commitment to tapered support is an encouraging indication that the government is now moving in a more compassionate direction.