Kent woman threatened with bailiffs as unpaid carers told to pay back £250 million in overpayments

• ITV Meridian's Ciaran Fitzpatrick has a special report looking into carer's allowance overpayments and why it's now being compared to the Post Office scandal

An unpaid carer from Kent owed £18,066 to the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) after she said she unwittingly breached Carer's Allowance rules.

Elizabeth Moss from Snodland, is one of an estimated 134,500 people who have been told to pay back vast amounts of money because they have gone over their entitled hours.

Her son has complex mental health issues and she claimed Carer's allowance from 2013 to 2020 while working part time in a post office.

She admits she wasn't aware of the threshold of a maximum of earning £151 a week. But she claims the DWP took 8 years to get through to her.

Moss said, "they sent me another letter saying that if I didn't get in touch with them, they would send the bailiffs round." She said she was terrified, "I had never had something like that before. I've always paid my debts, I have always paid everything.

"For them to threaten me straight away when it took them eight years to tell me that I owed the money, I was just sick to my stomach."

Elizabeth volunteered to pay back £50 a month, as that's all she could afford. This has now gone up to £200 since claiming PIP because of her own disability. Having made several appearances with politicians to raise the issues of Carer's Allowance, she said it needs reform.

Carer's Allowance rules

If you care for someone for more than 35 hours a week you are entitled to £81.90 in Carer’s Allowance.

But this only happens if you earn less than £151 per week elsewhere. Around 13 hours based on minimum wage.

If this goes over, even by just a few pennies, you must pay repay any allowance in full.

It's thought 134,500 people are affected, which is worth about £250m in overpayments.

Elizabeth Tait from Thames Ditton in Surrey has a similar story. Her son Oliver has Down's Syndrome and needs round the clock care. She also cared for her husband when he became terminally ill.

She claimed the benefit but said she unknowingly went over her hours while supply teaching.

Her overpayment of £1623 occurred because she thought that earnings would be averaged over the year, for example she wasn’t working during the summer holidays. She took it a tribunal, but the Judge ordered her to pay it back in full which she did.

"It made me feel like a criminal," said Tait. "If you a carer, you are under immense strain and you're not always on top of your finances as at that particular point."

Being a supply teacher, she said, you "quite often you get asked to do more work and I would just wanted to pay the bills and I inadvertently went over the limit."

The CEO of Carers UK said that the hours for the working threshold should be increased to 21 hours of the national living wage.

This, Helen Walker says, would "cut out that cliff edge, if they go over by just a pound, it would be tapered."

Walker says the scandal puts "a huge amount of stress on unpaid carers" who are already going through so much in their personal lives. The threat of going to court makes the situation even worse she said, especially with the "onus being on the carer" to keep on top of all this.

They, along with Elizabeth Tait and other unpaid carers, presented a dossier to the new minister Sir Stephen Timms in July, documenting up to 140 carers about their experiences of paying back their debt. In it, they heard from people who say they felt like criminals, really impacting their mental health and truly traumatic.

In a Debate on the issue in Parliament this October, Mel Stride, the Former work and pensions secretary said "there's an element of trust in how that benefit works...therefore there is an earnings limit.

"One's income has to be adjusted in order to decide if you are below that limit" pointing to pension reductions as a way of the challenges surrounding why the DWP may take time to figure out if a person is above a limit.

The new work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, announced an independent review into the overpayments on 16 October.

Led by Liz Sayce, former CEO of Disability Rights UK. It will focus on how and why such debts were accrued, consider what the department termed operational changes to minimise the risk of overpayment in future, and look at how people with overpayments can best be supported.

But Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey insisted the majority of cases of overpayment should be "written off immediately".

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