‘It’s like the Post Office scandal’: victims of carer’s allowance crisis speak out

Vivienne Groom had never been inside the dock of a criminal court when she stood, sobbing and shaking, before a judge last year. She was accused by the government of unlawfully claiming nearly £17,000 in carer’s allowance while she juggled a minimum wage supermarket job with being the sole carer for her dying mother. The quiet 61-year-old – with not even a parking ticket to her name – was horrified by the alleged infraction. She was prosecuted under legislation usually reserved for major drug dealers and told by the Department for Work and Pensions she could be sent to prison. “I was absolutely petrified. I was in such a mess. I wouldn’t have coped,” she said, adding that she would have killed herself had she been jailed. “I was suicidal. I would’ve done myself in.” One judge saw that Groom, from Tarvin near Chester, was evidently not the typical benefits cheat, telling her “you were living an ordinary lifestyle, just doing your best”. Another also showed compassion but, without legal representation and desperate to get the ordeal over, Groom pleaded guilty. She was spared jail but ordered to hand the government the entire £16,000 inheritance left by her mother, Maud, when she died at the age of 91. The shocking case is the first to be revealed by the Guardian as part of a carer’s allowance investigation that began in early 2024. Hundreds more carers have been prosecuted in a similar way and hundreds of thousands of people have been ordered to repay about £350m between them since 2019. A landmark independent review, due to be published on Tuesday, has concluded that scores of these cases were not “wilful rule-breaking” but honest mistakes made as a result of unclear rules and administrative failure at the DWP. Groom told the Guardian on Monday she welcomed the findings but that she would not be holding her breath for an official apology, a reimbursement, compensation or the quashing of her criminal conviction. “I would welcome that with open arms,” she said. “I’m not expecting someone rushing to my door saying here’s a cheque. It will take years. It’s like the Post Office scandal.” Groom has always maintained she told the DWP she no longer wanted to receive the £60-a-week allowance when the Co-op increased her hours in 2015, a year after she began caring for her mother. She said, however, that a DWP call-handler told her: “We’ll have to look into this and get back to you.” She next heard from the DWP in 2023 when she was told she faced jail for benefit fraud. In her mind, she had done the right thing and she made this clear in court, only for a DWP solicitor to say it was her “word against theirs and that any record of this call had probably got lost in the system”. “It was just horrendous,” she said. “They didn’t want to listen at all.” Groom, who cares for her two young grandchildren, said she felt vindicated to an extent by the review: “It’s the start of a new day, a milestone and hopefully we will get to the end of it one day.” Davina Ware from Bath was ordered to repay nearly £4,000 because she calculated the earnings of her part-time council job as monthly income, as she believed the DWP required, rather than as a four-week cycle. At the time she was the full-time carer for her husband, Mike, who has advanced Parkinson’s. She also welcomed the review, which is led by Liz Sayce, the former chief executive of Disability Rights UK, but said she wanted an acknowledgment from the DWP of its failure to carry out the fixes it promised in 2019. She said she also wanted to know why unpaid carers were not alerted immediately when they had overstepped the weekly earnings limit, given the technology allowed this. Until recently, officials were checking only about half of these overpayment alerts – meaning tens of thousands of people unknowingly racked up huge debts. “It made me feel completely worthless,” Ware said, her voice breaking. “I still get emotional about it all the time. They didn’t give me a chance or help me at all. Carers have enough on their plate but the government expects us to have hours and hours to do these calculations.” Ware, 68, will be paying the debt off until 2032 – when she will be 75. Guy Shahar, 53, is due to appear before a benefits tribunal judge within weeks after contesting a fine of £10,180 over alleged overpayments run up by his wife, Oksana, 53. She was juggling a zero-hours contract at Sports Direct, a part-time school meals assistant job and caring for their autistic son Daniel, 15. The Sayce review could have significant consequences for criminal prosecutions and tribunal hearings. A tribunal judge had been due to hear the Shahars’ case next week but agreed to the family’s request to postpone it in light of the imminent report. Shahar said anything that stopped short of an official apology, compensation, and an end to all carer’s allowance penalties would be disappointing. “I was hoping to see something much more decisive,” he added. “It’s an anxiety that’s always with us, a cloud cast over everything we do.”