Contribution
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, for explaining his amendments. Before we discuss the detail, I pay tribute to the millions of unpaid carers across the country. The Government value carers highly and recognise the vital contribution they make every day. I assure the noble Lord that my new Secretary of State feels just as strongly about this as the rest of us.
However, the reality is that, when we came into government, we realised we faced a flawed system where too many hard-working carers were left with often large overpayments to be repaid, sometimes worth thousands of pounds. I say clearly that I recognise the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, and others on the whole issue of carer’s allowance. It is precisely because this Government take the issue so seriously that we commissioned an independent review of earnings-related overpayments of carer’s allowance to understand exactly what had gone wrong and to make any necessary improvements.
We have received the report from the independent reviewer, and I thank Liz Sayce OBE who led the review for her work. We are currently finalising our response to the report, following careful and detailed consideration of its findings and recommendations. I am pleased to confirm that we will publish both the report produced by Liz Sayce and the Government’s response to it before the end of this year. My ministerial colleague has written to the chair of the Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee to notify her of this.
This Government set up the review because we are determined to deal with the problems the system has created for carers. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, will be reassured by today’s commitment. Once the report and government response are published, and he and his colleagues in the other place, if he wishes, have had the opportunity to consider both, the ministerial team and the DWP will be happy to meet them to discuss this important issue and the Government’s next steps in detail.
I also remind the noble Lord and the House that this review is not all the Government have done to put things right for carers. We have been reviewing our communications to make it as easy as possible for carers to tell the DWP when there has been a change in their circumstances that may affect their carer’s allowance payment. We have been improving guidance and processes for our staff on the treatment of earnings and putting in extra resources to process the earnings information we receive from HMRC.
I think the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, mentioned the cliff edge, which the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, is interested in. We have begun scoping work on introducing an earnings taper in carer’s allowance in the long run. This was mentioned by the Chancellor in the Budget. It is not straightforward, but a taper might be a way to further incentivise unpaid carers to do some work and could reduce the risk of significant overpayments. However, introducing a taper in carer’s allowance is not without its challenges. It could complicate the benefit as it currently stands and mean a significant rebuild of the system. The DWP has begun some scoping work to see whether an earnings taper might be an option in the longer term, but any taper, if introduced, will be several years away. I do not want to underplay the significance of trying to make changes such as that.
We have also introduced the largest increase in the earnings limit since carer’s allowance was introduced in 1976. That limit is now 16 hours of work at national living wage levels and over 60,000 additional people will be able to receive carer’s allowance between 2025-26 and 2029-30. I hope the noble Lord recognises this progress. He asked whether we would meet Carers UK. I can reassure him that Ministers and officials regularly meet Carers UK and other organisations which represent unpaid carers, as well as unpaid carers themselves. There have been meetings specifically on earnings-related overpayments in the past, and we expect further meetings in the future.