The DWP are still slapping carers with unlawful repayment bills as another inquiry looms

MPs are considering yet another inquiry into the carers’ allowance scandal Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). This time, it’s over the fact that the department is continuing to chase unpaid carers for discredited repayment bills.

Only, there’s a glaring issue here, isn’t there? There’s not a number of inquiries we can run, or an amount of faux outrage that MPs can show that will fix this problem.

Fundamentally, the entire political machinery of the last few decades has ensured that the DWP is dedicated to treating poor and disabled people as if they’re thieves.

MPs have ensured that the department will hound recipients at every opportunity – whether or not it’s even remotely valid. And now they’re feigning shock when the DWP is… hounding carers as if they’re thieves?

Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.

DWP: ‘difficult to find any justifiable reasons’

Back in November 2025, disability rights expert Liz Sayce published her damning review of carer’s allowance overpayments at the DWP. As a consequence, the government admitted that the rules it uses to average carers’ earnings failed to follow social security law. As a result, hundreds of carers had been convicted of benefit fraud.

However, Commons work and pensions select committee chair Debbie Abrahams has recently called out a “torrent of missteps” in the DWP’s actions since the review. In particular, the department has massively delayed its plans to repay the tens of thousands of carers it previously slapped with bogus overpayment bills.

Worse still, the Guardian published an investigation last week revealing that the DWP is still sending out repayment bills to carers. It knows those repayments were calculated using unlawful guidance – it simply doesn’t give a shit.

Carers Trust policy manager Ramzi Suleiman condemned the DWP’s continued use of the old guidance:

It’s difficult to find any justifiable reasons why the new guidance was not used to assess these alleged overpayments.

Likewise, Carers UK chief executive Helen Walker said that:

Carers need to see clear, proactive communication about the timeline for the reassessment process. We have heard from carers who say that they are living with significant uncertainty.

‘Not serious in its public commitment’

As such, Abrahams has fired off a letter to social security minister and all-round wet wipe Stephen Timms. She called out the DWP’s management culture, and said the failure to offer carers redress “with due care” would lead the public to:

conclude that [it] is not serious in its public commitment to do so, which is extremely damaging to the existing issues of trust with the department.

Spoiler alert: we have already concluded that the DWP is not serious about righting its injustices. Because, you know, its injustices could fill around 2,244 articles on a mid-sized indie news site.

As such, its quite unsurprising that MPs are ‘actively considering’ a fresh inquiry into the DWP’s treatment of unpaid carers. Of course, we can already tell them what they’ll find, but they won’t bloody like it.

And, speak of the devil – in reaction to the news, a DWP spokesperson said:

We’ve accepted the vast majority of the Sayce review’s recommendations and have already made changes – hiring extra staff, updating internal guidance, and making letters clearer.

Note the language they’re using here. The “making letters clearer” implies that carers are failing to understand. They’re not – they’re being slapped with illegal repayment bills.

Similarly, the ‘updating internal guidance’ clearly isn’t happening. It’s been four months since they were told their guidance was unlawful, and they’re still using it.

Repeatedly, successive governments have tasked the DWP with reducing benefits payments and rooting out largely imaginary ‘fraud’. They don’t get to feign shock that the DWP is hounding innocent people. That’s the department’s whole job – the same disgraceful job the government tasked them with.

Featured image via the Canary