A young carer who had looked after her disabled mother from the age of eight was forced to repay more than £2,000 when she unwittingly breached carer’s allowance benefit earnings rules after joining a government youth employment scheme.
Rose Jones, 22, said she was twice wrongly advised by her jobcentre work coach that her wages earned under the Kickstart scheme would not affect her eligibility for carer’s allowance.
Less than a year after she completed the six-month scheme, under which the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) paid her wages, she received a demand from the DWP demanding she pay back £2,145 of overpaid benefits.
“I was shocked when the letter arrived – it came on my 20th birthday – and I really didn’t know what to do. I thought it was a mistake because my work coach had told me it was fine. It was a really scary letter to receive,” Jones said.
The case is the latest in a stream of carer’s allowance injustices highlighted by a year- long Guardian investigation and a relatively rare case involving a young carer – most unpaid carers are much older adults.
At least 144,000 UK carers are repaying more than £250m in earnings-related carer’s allowance overpayments caused by what MPs said were “human mistakes” on the part of carers and repeated DWP administrative and policy failures. Thousands of carers have been prosecuted and millions of pounds of public money wasted.
The government last year vowed to reform aspects of carer’s allowance after widespread public outrage. It commissioned an independent review of carer’s allowance overpayments which is expected to report to ministers in July.
Jones began caring for her mother, who has physical and mental disabilities, at the age of eight, helping around the house and with shopping, looking out for her safety, and accompanying her to hospital appointments.
Being a carer affected her childhood and education, she said: “I was always quite hesitant to be away from my mum. I’d worry about her all the time when I was at school and struggle to focus. I wouldn’t want to go on sleepovers at friends’ houses.”
When she turned 16 she started to claim carer’s allowance and it was only when she took up a place in 2021 on the DWP’s Kickstart scheme aimed at young people at risk of long term unemployment, introduced during Covid in 2020, that it became an issue.
Jones said: “Before I’d accepted the job [though the Kickstart scheme] I told him [the job coach] I was on carer’s allowance and I told him the exact amounts I’d be on and that I’d be working from home so I’d be doing the same amount of caring as always.
“He assured me that he was confident that my carer’s allowance would not be affected. I asked him a couple of times, not just one phone call. I checked again after a couple of months once I had started earning my wage, and he reassured me, so I thought at this point everything was fine.”
The demand, when it came, felt massively unjust. “I’d been told by the work coach it was fine. I’d been a carer for my mum all my teenage years and felt my experiences had just been disregarded.”
Under Kickstart, the DWP paid employers £1,500 a month towards wages and training costs, with participants guaranteed to be paid the equivalent of 25 hours a week at the national minimum wage, in Jones’s case £164 a week, or £656 a month.
Jones was taken on as a digital marketing assistant by a local firm and under carer’s allowance rules was allowed to earn up to £128 a week on top of her carer duties, equivalent to 19.5 hours at the minimum wage for 18- to 20-year-olds.
Because she had unwittingly breached the weekly earnings limit, carer’s allowance rules meant she forfeited her £67.60 carer’s allowance. This “cliff edge” rule meant had she gone even £1 a week over the limit for six months she would have had to repay over £2,000.
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Jones said she was frustrated by different branches of the DWP – the jobcentre, the employment section and the carer’s allowance unit – which did not seem to be clear on the rules and had not routinely shared information about her case.
She was also shocked that the DWP had known about the earnings breach but had waited months before alerting her, allowing a debt to accrue that will take her years to repay. “It’s left me with a bit of distrust towards the DWP,” she said.
Emily Holzhausen, the director of policy at Carers UK, said: “It’s devastating to see a young person who has had a more challenging start in life be badly let down by the DWP.
“It’s not the first time that hard-pressed carers have been given the wrong information by people working for the DWP; the very people they trust to get the rules about benefits and entitlements right.
“The fact that the DWP’s computer systems don’t speak to each other have left many unpaid carers with unacceptable overpayments – despite the DWP having information that could have been used to stop them earlier.”
A DWP spokesperson said: “We understand the huge difference carers make as well as the struggles so many face.
“The carer’s allowance overpayment rate is now the lowest on record and we are increasing funding and bringing in more staff to check 100% of alerts to help prevent carers falling into debt.
“But we want to go further, that’s why we’ve launched an independent review of carer’s allowance to explore how earnings-related overpayments have happened and what changes can be made.”