The unpaid carer’s allowance in this country is £81.90 a week. It’s hard to see what serious thought went into arriving at that figure – any calculation of how much it costs to live on, for instance, or how much an unpaid carer is saving the government. Being without discernible curiosity about the lives of unpaid carers, or their contribution to society, it looks very much like a benefit handed down from on high; so at the very least, you’d expect the Department for Work and Pensions to keep on top of its administration.
That is not what happened. Unpaid carers are allowed to earn £151 a week before it affects the benefit. In nearly 30,000 cases last year, people breached that limit, it’s thought almost always unknowingly, and the DWP allowed debts to rack up, sometimes running to thousands of pounds. This won’t be the first time it’s been observed how bureaucracies that seem lackadaisical and unequal to their own responsibilities become unbelievably tenacious and forceful when it comes to the debts of others. It is accused of intimidatory tactics, against people who may have committed only minor breaches, rewarding them with criminal records and penury that has forced some to sell their homes.
It probably is one of the first times, however, that there has been such a wide consensus – from opposition parties to the centre-right thinktank Centre for Social Justice, bringing in MPs from all parties along the way – that this is unjust. The allowance for unpaid carers simply doesn’t have enough range, complexity or heft to be a site of significant fraud, even for those who have swallowed the Conservative fixation with benefit fraud in the first place. It’s a constituency, then, whose honesty is not in doubt, in which lives are turned upside down by a government department whose monolithic power to prosecute and punish appears untempered by any sense of proportionality, fairness or compassion.
It all has an acrid familiarity, from a country disgraced former prime ministers can enjoy a comfortable life on extravagant speaking fees, while post office workers can wait two decades to have their life savings and reputations restored. A culture of impunity grew out of austerity, one in which institutions and corporations were assumed to be telling the truth in the teeth of all evidence to the contrary, while people with regular jobs, people on benefits (these are, of course, usually the same people, thanks to wage stagnation, courtesy of those corporations) were assumed to be lying.
It was hugely abetted by a media class that recast as masochism what was actually sadism: no one ever wanted austerity for themselves, or for anything they might conceivably want to use, such as a hospital or a swimming pool. They wanted austerity for benefits claimants. Tabloid reporters tracked down “shameless mums” who admitted to claiming “£50,000 she didn’t need”. Heinous criminals – such as Mick Philpott, who killed six of his children in an arson attack whose details are still chokingly sad a decade later – were recast as “products of welfare”. Broadcasters made their poverty safaris on Benefits Street while columnists whose worst disability was gout looked down on all those other disabled people and their unaffordable staying-alive needs. The scandal of Britons “who’ve never worked a day in their lives,” was the sort of headline, from other opinionators, who probably worked for two hours a week.
It’s not fair to blame this entirely on the media, though the excesses of predominantly billionaire-captured titles do stick in the memory as the most outrageous. There was also insufficient pushback from all opposition parties against the fundamental proposition that the country had run out of money because poor people, being dishonest, had somehow spent it all. The Liberal Democrats were the most obviously complicit, but it also showed up in Labour’s persistent failure to vote against attacks on benefits claimants. More understandable, if no less catastrophic, was its failure to dispute the idea that it was somehow responsible – through humane policymaking, social welfare programmes and decent public services – for the need for austerity in the first place.
This narrative didn’t make it all the way to the finish line. Arguably, since Covid, and certainly since the cost of living crisis, the idea that people in poverty have brought that poverty upon themselves has been widely accepted as untrue and shameful.
But still, poverty itself, and the attendant asymmetry, where to be in receipt of a benefit payment is to be powerless before an unresponsive authority, both persist. A “common sense” in which welfare claimants were cheats was established, and legislation, regulation and scandal – the benefits sanctions, the three-child cap, the unpaid carers prosecutions – cascaded down from it inexorably. The “commonsense” view, once built, endures, as prosecuted carers have discovered. It stands until you tear it down.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
