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The head of an official inquiry into carer’s allowance has criticised “forces of resistance” inside the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) that undermined ministerial attempts to fix longstanding problems with the much-criticised benefit.
Liz Sayce, whose review of carer’s allowance was published in November, said rather than owning the problems, some at the DWP had tried to “minimise” the extent of the department’s failures and sought to deflect blame for the crisis.
An award-winning Guardian investigation last year revealed how the DWP failures led to hundreds of thousands of unpaid carers unwittingly running up huge debts after becoming trapped by an opaque, poorly administered and punitive system.
Many carers suffered serious ill-health as a result, and hundreds were convicted of benefit fraud owing to their experiences over a period of years, which the review described as like being “at the whim of a faceless machine”.
Sayce’s review of carer’s allowance overpayments in November found the blame lay with “systemic” issues at the DWP and emphasised carers should not be held responsible for falling foul of what it said were complex and confusing benefit rules.
She told MPs on the work and pensions select committee on Wednesday she had been surprised by how for years the DWP had repeatedly ignored the problems, despite an internal whistleblower identifying serious shortcomings with the benefit.
Asked by the committee chair, Debbie Abrahams, whether there had been a change in attitude and behaviour at the DWP, Sayce said while she had come across people in the department who wanted to learn and change, she had also come across what she called “forces of resistance”.
She had been distressed by Guardian reports of an internal DWP blogpost, written by a DWP director general, Neil Couling, just days after her report was published, in which he insisted – at odds with the review’s conclusions and government policy – that carers were ultimately to blame for the debts they incurred.
She said: “I was really distressed by that blog, as I am sure many people were. Because 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.”
Asked by the Liberal Democrat MP John Milne whether she thought there was a “culture problem” at the DWP, she replied: “I think there are some senior people who are serious about making the changes that are needed. [But] I felt that sometimes there was almost a kind of effort to minimise what had gone wrong.”
She said senior leaders had to own the problems, explain what had gone wrong and understand why it had to “shift the culture” and ensure reforms were pushed through. “The senior team needs to be on that case. It needs to be a bit more systematic than just good intent,” she said.
She added: “This is about making sure there’s a join-up and the real values, the important values of serving people, and the purposes of carer’s allowance are front and centre and constantly reinforced from senior people right across the department.”
Earlier this month, the DWP permanent secretary, Sir Peter Schofield, announced he would step down in July for personal reasons after eight years in the top job. The department said his departure was not related to carer’s allowance.
The DWP hierarchy has been repeatedly criticised in recent weeks for what MPs have called “unacceptable behaviour” over its handling of the carer’s allowance scandal. Schofield was accused by Abrahams of overseeing a “culture of complacency”.
