As a former carer, this strikes home to me.

Here’s the BBC:

“Thousands of unpaid carers will have their cases reassessed after an official review found they had been left with huge debts caused by systemic failures.

“Former charity boss Liz Sayce found confusing guidance on Carer’s Allowance – given to those providing 35 hours of unpaid care a week – had left thousands with fines and surprise bills, sometimes running into thousands of pounds.

“The Guardian newspaper uncovered hundreds of carers claiming Carer’s Allowance had been convicted of benefit fraud, while others claimed they were harassed for money by officials.

“Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said… “We inherited this mess from the previous government, but we’ve listened to carers, commissioned an independent review, and are now making good for those affected.””

This is an extraordinary, systemic failure that ran for a decade – and it reads, frankly, like a policy designed to look supportive of carers while quietly exploiting them to save Treasury cash.Are victimised unpaid carers finally about to get relief?

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• The rules on Carers Allowance were unclear, leading people into “breaches” they had no realistic way to avoid.
• The DWP routinely failed to warn carers when they crossed the earnings limit, often for months or years.
• Overpayments accumulated in silence, then carers were hammered with massive debts.
• Courts and the DWP themselves were applying the law inconsistently because the guidance was “broadly drawn”.
• Carers were prosecuted for fraud even though the review explicitly found it was not wilful wrongdoing.

The new Labour government saying it will “reassess cases” and potentially cancel or repay debts is at least an acknowledgement of the injustice – something the Conservatives never conceded.

But the BBC notes that actual changes may not take effect for a year, meaning carers are still stranded in limbo.

So: there is a path to relief – but it is slow, bureaucratic, and still largely undefined.

Until the DWP publishes how reassessment will work, nothing concrete is guaranteed.

Given the evidence, were the Tories just trying to stop carers getting anything, in order to save money?

This is the uncomfortable conclusion lurking in the background – and the Sayce review practically leads us there.

The evidence suggests:

• The system was set up in a way that made accidental rule-breaches inevitable.
• The “cliff-edge” rule maximised the number of weeks that could be clawed back.
• ‘Averaging’ rules – that allowed carers to show average earnings over a period of time – existed in law, but were so vague that carers could easily be accused of breaking them.
• The DWP failed to warn people in real time when they exceeded the earnings limit.
• This allowed debts to balloon to truly punitive scales.
• Carers were prosecuted even where guidance itself was unclear.

Those characteristics are not random.

They are not “unfortunate consequences”.

They have a structural logic:

They increased the likelihood of overpayments, maximised the sums reclaimed, and minimised the number of people successfully claiming Carer’s Allowance without penalty.

This is entirely consistent with Austerity-era policy design, in which:

• complexity was a tool
• ambiguity was a deterrent
• punitive recovery regimes were built to reduce spending by shifting blame onto claimants

Was there an explicit Tory intention to “stop carers getting anything”? Probably not in so many words.

But was the system deliberately maintained in this shape because it saved money and fit their wider political narrative? Absolutely, and the evidence overwhelmingly supports that interpretation.

If you take the Sayce report at face value, you end up with the same conclusion the Guardian investigations have found for years:

The Conservatives built and maintained a system that predictably set carers up to fail, and then punished them for failing.

And it must be stressed: the UK relies on unpaid carers to save the state billions of pounds per year. Treating them like this is not an oversight. It’s a strategy.

The political question now

Pat McFadden’s line – “we inherited this mess from the previous government” – is true.

But the Labour government has a choice now:

• Either genuinely fix the system and write off the debts in practice, not just in theory
• Or quietly replicate the Conservative approach with nicer language and a slower timetable

We will see which of those paths they choose, soon enough.