Carer’s Allowance

Ben Coleman Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Ben Coleman (Chelsea and Fulham) (Lab)]

This has been an extraordinarily interesting debate. I pay tribute to everybody who has spoken and thank the would-be official Opposition for having secured it. In my constituency of Chelsea and Fulham, we have nearly 7,000 unpaid carers, a quarter of whom provide more than 50 hours of care a week. I know many of them, and I know what a vital, tough job they do for their loved ones, as well as the value that carers bring to this country’s economy—many speakers have touched on that. I also know that carers deserve to be treated with kindness, but instead have been treated with cruelty. My hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis) touched on the local cruelty that he has experienced from his Conservative council, but nationally, through a mixture of official incompetence and political indifference, carers have been treated cruelly.

Let us be clear: the Department for Work and Pensions cocked up here and cocked up badly. When carers told officials dealing with universal credit that they breached earnings limits, officials did not necessarily pass that on to those officials dealing with carer’s allowance. When carer’s allowance officials were alerted to breaches, they did not act, in many cases for months. They did not look at their emails, so payments were allowed to build up, as has been remarked on, to as much as £48,000. Then the Department for Work and Pensions swooped in, threatened prosecutions and penalties, and in many cases did not listen to perfectly reasonable explanations. It brought in a technical solution that failed to sort the problem out. Why? Because it was woefully under-resourced. Those at the top of the Department for Work and Pensions have never properly apologised for the cruel system that they allowed to be maintained for so long. Why did they not do that? It is simple: they took their cue, as people in the civil service do, from those above them—from their political masters, the Ministers.

The shadow Secretary of State was asked by the would-be Leader of the Opposition whether he had ever asked officials how much overpayment was fraudulent. From his response, I suspect it was a question that he never asked. Why did he not ask that, and why did he fail to publish the DWP report from 2021 on the overpayment crisis until just before the election? I suspect the answer is that he was more interested in covering up than in finding out what was going on and sorting out the problem.

I am delighted that the Labour Government are now sorting this out. The review is a start. As many Members have said, there is much more to be done to support unpaid carers, but they will no longer be hung out to dry by a cruel, incompetent, indifferent Government, and that has to be a good thing.