The Department for Work and Pensions should be disbanded, says a government dementia advisor quitting over prosecutions of carers.

Johnny Timpson is quitting because tens of thousands of unpaid carers have been fined huge sums of money – some of them prosecuted – for minor infringements of earnings rules.

This Writer is a carer – but my earnings are well within the limits because I am a left-wing political journalist on the social media and the right-wing platforms are squeezing me off everybody’s newsfeeds, so the DWP won’t get me.

But I do feel for my fellow carers – especially if these fines are being made because earnings are being measured on arbitrary timescales.

It is entirely possible that a carer may be within their earnings limit if the time period on which it is measured is a year – but not if only one week is examined, so I fear mischief on the part of the DWP.

So does Mr Timpson, according to The Guardian, which is running a campaign on the issue:

“The fact that we have made absolutely no progress at all on social care [and] we really did not support carers adequately during the pandemic,” he said. “But this latest thing – the approach the DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] are taking to reclaim benefits from carers and people with disabilities, particularly with neurological disabilities – is beyond the pale for me really.”

He said the DWP’s approach to carer’s allowance was in breach of its own policy towards protecting vulnerable benefit claimants. “The DWP has its own vulnerable customer policy and practice and quite frankly it’s not following it,” he said.

“We have huge regulatory focus on fundamental customer support in regulated sectors and the DWP is completely out of step with what’s happening in private sector organisations – and really no one has been taken to account so I wanted to take a stand and call this out.”

He said the DWP had become “too big and too removed” and should potentially be disbanded as part of a wider reform of the welfare sector.

Separately, one of the government’s disability ambassadors, Kathryn Townsend, has described the DWP’s approach as “extremely concerning” and urged the department to immediately stop clawing back carer’s allowance overpayments.

Nothing will come of this under the current Tory government or a Labour government, if that’s what we’re lumbered with after the election.

The DWP is doing precisely what the Tories and Keir Starmer’s cronies want; it is pushing the sick and disabled, and those who try to help them, to their deaths.

Source: UK government dementia adviser resigns over prosecutions of carers | Carers | The Guardian

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