Politics
It’s Carers Week, but the government doesn’t care
It’s Carers Week, and unsurprisingly, the Labour government couldn’t care less.
Despite this being an easy way to prove that they at least superficially give a toss, neither the DWP nor the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) have posted about the week on social media.
Carers Week ignored this year
Just one department has posted about it, and it was to remind people to fill in a consultation about enabling unpaid carers to get back into work
Millions could re-enter the workforce if better workplace protections for unpaid carers were implemented. That’s why we’re consulting on possible changes to pay and leave entitlements. Have your say: https://t.co/81dhMf7enM pic.twitter.com/dpWr86WKkQ
— Department for Business and Trade (@biztradegovuk) June 9, 2026
The Department for Business and Trade posted a link to a consultation on employment rights for unpaid carers and parents of seriously ill children. Whilst this would make a difference, it ignores the fact that many carers can’t work because of their caring responsibilities.
DWP penalises informal carers
It’s also deeply hypocritical that the government wants to push more carers to be cogs in the capitalist machine when they’ve penalised so many for earning what they deem to be too much.
Carers have been battling for justice from the DWP for a long time. Those running the department still refuse to take accountability.
Just days after a scathing review into the government’s handling of the Carers Allowance scandal was published, a DWP senior civil servant published a blog post blaming carers for failing to report changes.
In an internal blog post seen by the Guardian, Neil Coulling said:
Incidentally what has been missed in all the [media] coverage is that this error (and hands up we made it and we will put it right) affects only a relatively small number of cases and wasn’t the cause of the original complaint. Because at the heart of the overpayment issues in [Carers Allowance] is a failure to report changes of circumstances.
It’s almost as if said carers are too busy looking after their loved ones and trying their hardest not to get into debt that they don’t have time to spend hours doing the DWP’s job for them.
The review found that some carers contemplated suicide due to the distress of being expected to pay back thousands of pounds that they never knew they owed.
Carers described how they were expected to work to strict DWP timelines but then made to wait excruciating lengths of time for responses. In some cases, they never received a reply at all.
One carer described it as “playing a game where only the other side knows the rules”.
The review especially highlighted how much senior figures within the DWP (such as Couling) were repeatedly warned of the issues in the system yet ignored them for more than a decade.
DWP hopes carers scandal will fizzle away
In a Work and Pensions Committee hearing, Liz Sayce, who headed up the inquiry, said the DWP was minimising the problem and deflecting the blame.
When asked about Couling’s comments, she said:
What you were hoping for from senior people at that point was to really share with colleagues across the department the seriousness of this – what has been learned, what is going to be put right. Not attempt to minimise or again, place a responsibility back on the carers, as if it was their fault.
Sayce also felt that senior members of staff had attempted to brush the issue under the carpet.
I felt that sometimes there was a kind of effort to almost minimise what had gone wrong to reassure staff that they hadn’t done anything. And actually that’s the wrong thing to do. As a leader in such a circumstance what you need to do, I think, is to own the problem, explain why the system wasn’t right.
When asked by the Committee to explain itself, the DWP floundered. Peter Schofield, permanent secretary of the DWP, waffled on so much that Lib Dem Steve Darling accused him of talking “blancmange”.
Darling said:
You’ve given me a lot of blancmange that I’m finding difficult to nail to the ceiling what clear evidence of management change is there, and I’m concerned that you’re not able to give me any.
Laughably, Schofield’s response claimed the DWP always fixed its mistakes.
We’ve got a great track record of putting things right when things go wrong. This is a department that when it knows we have to get things right we put it right.
DWP works exactly how the government wants
And despite all this, the DWP is still chasing carers over supposedly unpaid bills. The Canary reported the situation is so bad that another inquiry could be looming.
However, as we pointed out, the DWP is doing exactly what the government told it to.
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.
At the end of the day, no amount of sanctimonious nothing sentiments from the government will make up for the fact that they enable a department whose primary focus is to hound vulnerable people and instead of supporting them, work to actively make their lives worse.
Featured image via Naomi Baker/ Getty Images
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