Unpaid carers who were pursued for bills for thousands of pounds after welfare officials unlawfully changed benefit rules could wait years before learning whether they will get the money back, campaigners have warned. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is working through 200,000 cases where carer’s allowance benefit recipients were incorrectly given overpayments. An estimated 25,000 carers could receive full or partial refunds.
However, several months into the two-year reassessment exercise just a tiny fraction of the caseload has been processed – and at current rates charities say the project will not be completed until 2054. Campaigners are concerned by the slow pace of progress and worry that unless it speeds up some unpaid carers may die, or become untraceable after stopping their claim for carer’s allowance, before they are repaid. The reassessment followed an official review, which concluded systemic DWP failures caused hundreds of thousands of carer’s allowance recipients unknowingly to run up debts as high as £20,000 through no fault of their own.
The review was triggered by an award-winning Guardian investigation, which revealed how years of government neglect and mismanagement forced unpaid carers into severe financial hardship and emotional despair and resulted in hundreds of millions of pounds being misspent. Ministers promised in December 2024 to end a scandal they consider to be an inheritance from the previous government, but nearly two years on MPs and campaigners have repeatedly expressed doubts about the speed of the response, the DWP’s appetite for change and its handling of the process. Although the DWP has hired more staff and taken steps to try to stop overpayments, more than 30,000 more overpayments were made in 2025-26, including 78 for over £20,000.
Last year official figures revealed 144,000 carers were still paying off carer’s allowance overpayment debts accrued over several years. There was fury early this year when it emerged the DWP had slapped overpayments on 1,400 carers for allegedly breaking carer’s allowance rules, even though officials knew the decisions to issue penalties were based on faulty and discredited guidance. The reassessment process, which started in April, is looking specifically at cases where the DWP breached the law by failing to allow carers with irregular wages from part-time work to average their incomes over a year, unfairly exposing them to being penalised for breaching earnings limits.
Last week Stephen Timms, the welfare minister, told MPs so far 3,000 cases had been reviewed as part of the £75m reassessment programme, and the DWP was on track to complete the process in the planned timescale. Carers UK said it was concerned that, so far, just 1.5% of the total projected caseload had been processed, and at current rates the reassessment would take 27 years to complete. It is unclear whether any carers have been repaid.
We cannot risk carers being left to wait for years for a resolution to an injustice which was not their fault.” A DWP spokesperson said: “We are on track to complete the carer’s allowance reassessment exercise within the three years previously announced.
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