Latest news with #carersallowance
Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE The fraudster next door: How woman posed as ordinary housewife living in boring suburban cul-de-sac… but was running secret £270k benefits scam for a DECADE
There is nothing remotely out of the ordinary about Angela Lloyd and Lee Phillips' semi-detached house on a quiet cul-de-sac in Merseyside. And to the common eye, Lloyd looks like a normal middle-aged mum who works tirelessly to care for her sick husband. So it was to the sheer shock of neighbours when police descended on their driveway to raid the couple's St Helens home. Hiding behind the family's net curtains was in fact a decade-long web of lies which saw Lloyd and Phillips pocket £270k in taxpayer money. Mother-of-two Lloyd, 58, cried 'Oh my god' as she was jailed this week over a string of untruths including using a dead woman's identity, making up 'bogus' medical conditions for her son, and creating pseudonyms to work while claiming carers allowance. Husband Phillips, 54, was also jailed after the pair's massive benefits fraud was finally exposed. While the couple managed to siphon off their ill-gotten gains for years - neighbours have revealed to MailOnline the obvious clues that the couple were running a scam. Initially, neighbours on Birch Gardens were worried for the couple after Phillips was seen looking very frail as he would 'hobble' on his walking stick to meet his carers. But they were then left puzzled when he was at other times spotted washing his BMW, driving, and even playing a DJ set for their street party for the late Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Locals also told of how there was 'always something dodgy' about Lloyd, and that she would never look people 'in the eye', but would boast about 'secret £60k caravan' they would escape to on the weekends. Lloyd was sentenced to two years after Liverpool Crown Court found she fraudulently pocketed nearly £170,000 in benefits over a decade, and also helped Phillips falsely claim benefits worth £100,000, as reported by the Liverpool Echo. When neighbours saw them packing up one of their two cars earlier this week, they thought they were going off to stay at their secret caravan, only to find they were going to jail. One neighbour told MailOnline of the couple: 'I thought they were dodgy as he made a real show of not being able to walk whenever his carers were here. 'He was shuffling along and holding onto his cars in the driveway before he took a long time to get to his carer's car on his walking stick. 'But the next thing I saw him washing his BMW in the driveway - he seemed to be walking fine then. 'And he did a DJ set for the Queen's Jubilee party back in 2022. He had all the speakers out and everything. 'But after the police raid, they became more reserved and didn't say a lot to people. 'There was always something dodgy about her - she wouldn't look people in the eye and bragged about going to her £60,000 caravan but would never say where it was. 'They would take her teenage son and go away on a Thursday night and not come home until Sunday.' Phillips had fraudulently claimed £100k in PIP, housing benefits, employment support allowance and council tax reductions that he was not eligible for. Neighbours told of how he would look 'frail' and 'hobble on a walking stick' in the presence of carers, but at other times was seen 'walking fine' Following the police raid on the quiet suburban street, neighbours were left with questions as to why the couple had been arrested - and some allege Lloyd had later told them it was down to dog breeding. But these questions were finally put to rest on Tuesday when the court heard how Lloyd had claimed a total of £169,394.15 which she was not qualified for in housing benefits, carers allowance and personal independence payments over the course of 11-and-a-half years. With the help of Lloyd, Phillips was also found to have illegally claimed £100,980.71 through PIP, housing benefits, employment support allowance and council tax reductions since 2018. Olivia Beesley, prosecuting, outlined how the mother-of-two's elaborate scam began when she falsely began claiming housing benefits for a caravan on Riverside Walk in Southport - which was found to be a 'fictitious address'. She even made a fake tenancy agreement for the 'entirely fictitious caravan', ultimately pocketing £71,597.16 from Lancashire Borough Council in relation to the non-existent residence. Then in 2018, she began making fraudulent claims that her husband needed 'multiple daily carers to attend to his needs'. She went as far as using Phillips' sister Zoe's birth certificate to pose as his sibling and claim that she was his main carer. She also lied that she was unable to work due to being a full-time carer, but was found to have been working under a false identity Wendy Lloyd at care company Hand in Hand Homecare, and under another pseudonym Angela Valentine at a Tesco. In 2022, she began inventing 'false medical conditions' for her son, claiming she had a carer called Joyce Bibby - a dead woman's identity. Nearly £10k in false disability living allowance overpayments were claimed in relation to this. She again used the deceased woman's name as being her social worker to claim £13,526.70 of PIP, stating that she needed carers due to 'health conditions'. When MailOnline visited Phillips' address in Birch Gardens which he shared with Lloyd, neighbours revealed how the couple and her son would supposedly go off to a caravan on the weekends. It is not known whether this was the same 'fictitious caravan' which transpired to have never existed, or a indeed a separate, real caravan. Leni Newton, 63, said: 'She told people that the police raid was because someone had told on her for breeding border collie puppies without a licence. 'I'm shocked they've been jailed. I thought they were all above board. 'I only saw them a few days ago packing up suitcases - I thought they were just going to their caravan.' She added: 'I know they met as she was his carer. He was married but Angela moved in. I thought she had lived in Southport. 'I did see his ex-wife parked up in the street watching his house when they split. 'She was obviously spying on them.' Her partner David Manchester, 70, said: 'It's a big surprise they seemed to be living a double life. 'There were a lot of police came here. 'He was at the street party for the Queen but other times he did seem very frail.' Hand in Hand homecare agency confirmed to MailOnline that Lloyd had bona fide references, DBS checks and training certificates in the name of Wendy Lloyd. A spokesman said: 'We sacked her immediately when we found out the truth. 'All her DBS and references checked out. The police said we had done nothing wrong.' The court heard how Phillips also swindled money from the public purse by failing to disclose the fact that Lloyd had moved into his home in 2018 - allowing him to continue claiming more than £13k in housing benefits and £2.2k in council tax reductions. He is also said to have 'exaggerated' his medical conditions and need for care, stating that he was unable to do anything for himself. He declared himself 'unfit for work' and failed to mention his wife's wage - illegally pocketing £51k in employment support allowance. However, Phillips alleged that Lloyd had completed the form and had just 'asked him to sign it'. Phillips' counsel Jim Smith argued he has a 'complex recent history' of mental health and disabilities including neurological disorder, anxiety and depression. He was also said to have a pacemaker fitted and appeared in court in a wheelchair. While Phillips had no previous convictions relating to similar matters, however Lloyd's criminal record shows previous entries for theft and dishonesty offences dating as far back as the 1980s - though her last appearance was in 2012. Lloyd was jailed for two years after admitting seven counts of fraud by false representation, and Phillips was also seen wiping back tears as he was jailed for 20 months for fraud by false representation and three counts of dishonestly failing to disclose information to make a gain. Sentencing, Judge Simon Medland KC said: 'Over an 11-year period, or more than that, you, Angela Lloyd, managed to defraud the public of just short of £170,000 and you, Lee Phillips, of about £100,000. In your case, Mr Phillips, over a five-year period, you had about £20,000 per year which you defrauded from the public. 'For those who seek to defraud the public of scarce and valuable benefits which need to be directed to those who need them, not those who simply wish to have them for reasons of personal greed, that is a serious offence committed by each of you over a long period of time.'
The Guardian
24-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
‘Something has gone very wrong': how the carers scandal was exposed
One February afternoon in 2016, Sir Robert Devereux, at the time the most powerful official in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), was stopped by a junior colleague as he walked through the car park of a civil service office in Preston, Lancashire. Was he aware, the worker asked, about the problems with carer's allowance? Devereux, on a flying visit to the DWP outpost, asked for details and promised to look into it. A few days later, Devereux's office received a long and detailed note, complete with 80 anonymised case studies, setting out how years of shortcomings in the administration of the carer's allowance benefit had wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers' money and inflicted untold hardship and misery on thousands of unpaid carers. Enrico La Rocca, a civil servant based in Preston's carer's allowance unit, wrote in the memo: 'I have raised this issue many times with management up to directorate level and I have been consistently disappointed and depressed by the lack of will to improve things. I hope you will be able to put this right.' La Rocca's warnings, shared with his union, centred on the issue of carer's allowance overpayments. The benefit is paid to about 1 million unpaid carers – people who carry out the arduous and demanding task of providing round-the-clock care for frail, sick or disabled loved ones. It is the UK's lowest-value benefit, worth £83.30 a week. Those who claim it are allowed to work part-time but there is a strict limit on how much they can earn: if they earn a single penny over that limit – £196 a week – their entire benefit is considered to be an overpayment, a debt that is then owed to the DWP. This so-called 'cliff edge' means a carer who earned £1 more than the threshold for 52 weeks would pay back not £52 but £4,258.80. The effect had created a debt trap, and La Rocca could see thousands of people falling into it. La Rocca, a carer's allowance specialist with two decades of service under his belt, had become increasingly alarmed, but his attempt to raise the alarm in the Preston car park was not the gamechanging intervention he hoped it would be. Instead, it would be the first in a series of spurned opportunities to put things right. What followed was a groundhog day sequence of DWP complacency, inertia and cover-ups. The DWP would deny there were problems; when the problems became no longer deniable, it would typically insist carers themselves were at fault and promise that new technology would ride to the rescue. There would be no apologies. Little would change. The injustices borne by carers, meanwhile, would rumble inexorably on. By the time a Guardian investigation exposed the scale of the scandal last year, the cost of that failure to put things right eight years previously had become vividly real: hundreds of thousands more carers caught in a web of avoidable misery and debt over minor rules breaches, thousands more prosecuted for fraud, and hundreds of millions more pounds of taxpayers' money wasted. The invisible world of unpaid carers would leap on to the front pages of national media, become a staple of daytime TV and a political talking point. It would be regarded as a social policy disaster. And, as a result of the way it pitted a vast and ruthless bureaucracy against powerless and vulnerable carers, it would be routinely compared to the Post Office scandal. Last year, Vivienne Groom, then 59, wept as she stood in the dock at a court in Chester. A shy, quiet woman with an unblemished criminal record and without even a parking ticket to her name, she had been convicted of benefit fraud and handed a 12-month community order. She was told the £16,000 inheritance left to her by her late mother, to whom she had provided full-time unpaid care for years, would be confiscated by the state. To do so, the government was using the proceeds of crime laws – legislation designed to seize the ill-gotten mansions and speedboats of gangsters and drug smugglers. Groom's crime was to have earned marginally more in her part-time job in a Co-op store than was allowed under strict carer's allowance benefit rules. For five years while caring full-time for her elderly mother, who had had a stroke, she supplemented her meagre carer's allowance – then £60 a week – by working 16 hours a week for the minimum wage. At a hearing the previous November, the judge seemed to accept Groom's claim that she had made an 'honest mistake'. As Groom had admitted guilt, the judge had little option but to convict her, but he made it clear he would not send her to prison – despite benefit compliance officers having told her she faced up to seven years in jail. There were a 'wealth of mitigating factors' in her favour, the judge pointed out, and no aggravating ones. 'You were doing the best for your mother,' he declared. Although Groom said she did not know she was breaching carer's allowance earnings rules, the DWP did – or at least it should have known. Over the five years during which she received carer's allowance, the Guardian estimates the DWP would have received between 15 and 50 electronic alerts warning that Groom had breached earnings limits. Had civil servants checked the alerts at the beginning of her claim in late 2014 they could have telephoned her, warned her of the infraction and cancelled the benefit. The amount she would have had to repay would have been nearer £1,500, way below the £5,000 threshold for criminal prosecution, and a tiny fraction of the £17,000 she was eventually forced to repay. Had the alerts been checked, Groom's inheritance and her reputation would have remained intact. Instead, the data highlighting Groom's inadvertent earnings infringements were repeatedly missed by the DWP. She was not an unusual case in this regard. According to the National Audit Office, around this time just under 12% of the 3,000 earnings alerts arriving at the department's carer's allowance section each month were being checked. That its own administrative shortcomings were in part responsible for the overpayment seems not to have crossed the DWP's mind when it referred her case to the Crown Prosecution Service. Vivienne's husband, Geoff, summed up the bitter disbelief and injustice felt by many unpaid carers about their treatment: 'Viv is being punished now for looking after her mum,' he told the Guardian when the ruling was handed down last year. 'The DWP are the criminals here. This can't be right.' The Guardian has seen evidence of scores of similar examples of 'cliff-edge' cases, where minor earnings breaches resulted in life-changing debt. In one case a Lancashire school dinner lady was allowed to accrue overpayments over a five-year period from 2013. Her earnings never exceeded the limit by more than £14.52 in any week; in some periods she overstepped the weekly threshold by just 29p. During the entire period she earned just £1,900 more than she was allowed. Under the 'cliff-edge' rules she was forced to repay £14,000. But it was not just the cliff edge itself that created such a huge overpayment. For years the DWP has received regular electronic alerts from HMRC warning it if a carer has potentially earned more than the weekly carer's allowance earnings limit. In theory, by hiring enough staff to check the alerts and act on them speedily, it could identify and eliminate overpayments within days. But as Groom found to her cost, it appeared reluctant to do so. The real-life consequence of this underpowered data-matching policy was to push carers who worked part-time around the edges of the earnings limit into a random high-stakes lottery: a breach of the limit might be spotted by DWP straight away, it might rumble on for years before finally being detected, or it might never be spotted at all. A carer who fell foul of the earnings rules might randomly end up repaying nothing, £70 or £17,000. La Rocca's February 2016 memo to Devereux highlighted this. 'Because of the limits CAU (Carer's Allowance Unit) have put on data-matching in recent years, overpayments that we could have picked up after less than a year have been allowed to extend to two or three years or even longer,' he wrote. It was 'routine' to identify earnings-related overpayments of £5,000 or more, he added. He'd even seen one for £24,000. Five months later one of La Rocca's managers replied to the memo. The issues he raised had been investigated. They grudgingly admitted that administrative failures had indeed occurred, but said an action plan was now in place – 'the overarching control environment will be enhanced', the jargon-heavy email promised. No thanks were offered to La Rocca for bringing the failures to light. Clouded in management-speak as it was, the message was crystal clear: La Rocca should lay off now; the problem was sorted and the case closed. Meanwhile, a stream of avoidable overpayments continued to flow across La Rocca's desk. He wrote to the DWP's financial controller in March 2017 to warn that little seemed to have changed, but he was rebuffed. Everything was in hand, he was assured, and there would be no 'further correspondence' on the matter. Increasingly frustrated, he wrote to Devereaux's successor as DWP permanent secretary, Peter Schofield, a year later in August 2018. What horrified La Rocca was not just that the DWP had allowed thousands of carers to build up massive overpayment debts, but the department was preparing to prosecute hundreds of carers for benefit fraud. 'I cannot see how the department can justify instigating a fraud drive on these cases … when [the] DWP is at least partially responsible for allowing their overpayments to continue unchecked,' he wrote. He added, again with eerie prescience: 'I would not be surprised if part of the true picture of the unfortunate circumstances behind these cases emerged at some point and the department would inevitably be seen in a bad light.' La Rocca did not get a reply until November 2018. A senior DWP director, writing on behalf of Schofield, refused to accept there was much wrong with carer's allowance compliance work. The onus was on carers, not the DWP, to report 'changes in circumstances' such as earning over the limit, regardless of whether they knew that had done so. Besides, they added, in what was clearly intended to be a clincher, the department's earnings compliance technology was being upgraded as part of a drive to prevent overpayments. La Rocca felt his concerns were again being swept under the carpet. However, unpaid carers were about to get a very public champion. Frank Field, a veteran Labour MP and the respected chair of the Commons work and pensions select committee, had got wind of the issue. Field had begun to extract carer's allowance data from the DWP, What he uncovered profoundly shocked him. Not only were tens of thousands of claimants running up carer's allowance debts, but the amounts were huge. In 2016, when La Rocca first raised the issue with DWP top brass, the largest overpayment debt was £47,800; the following year it was £42,000. In 2018, Field discovered a claimant had been hit with a £48,500 bill, a breach that had clearly gone undetected by the DWP for many years. The massive financial risks triggered by the carer's allowance trap were being unfairly placed on unpaid carers, Field realised. He wrote to the public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, demanding an urgent investigation. 'It is deeply concerning that the department has allowed claimants to accrue such eye-wateringly large overpayments,' he said. 'More than just an oversight, these figures suggest that systematic failings or gross incompetence – or a combination of the two – are at play.' He went on: 'It is carers who will bear the brunt of these failings as the department seeks to claw back the money from people who can ill afford to lose it.' Field launched a work and pensions select committee investigation into carer's allowance. Its conclusions, published in early August 2019, were devastating: the design of the benefit in effect 'set carers up for a fall'. Years of complacency and under-resourcing had allowed overpayments to 'spiral out of control', not least because of the DWP's reluctance to properly check earnings alerts. It said carers had been heavily penalised for making 'honest mistakes'. The committee was furious that Schofield, who had appeared before MPs two months earlier, had refused three times to apologise for the mess. The inquiry set out no fewer than 19 recommendations for change. The DWP, it concluded angrily, had 'stuck its head in the sand and done nothing'. If at this point there was political pressure to fix carer's allowance – and the DWP had promised MPs it would do so – it was not to last. Within months, in December 2019, a general election was held. The committee was disbanded and Field and other key MPs lost their seats. Three months later, Britain was in Covid lockdown. The righteous head of steam building around carer's allowance disappeared. What did not disappear was the broken benefit that was quietly continuing to ruin lives, and the fundamental flaw that with every passing week was tipping more carers into debt and potential criminality. In April 2024 the Guardian revealed that tens of thousands of unpaid carers were still inadvertently running up massive overpayments each year, hundreds of whom had been prosecuted for fraud. Scores of carers contacted us, each with vivid and harrowing tales to tell. Many were angry that the same politicians who glibly praised them as 'unsung heroes' were happy to oversee a brutal system that was seemingly quick to label them as fraudsters. The scandal of a minor benefit administered in a cruel and unfair manner had become an issue for daytime TV and late-night political debate. Emboldened, carers began to fight overpayment decisions in tribunals – and win. But despite broader awareness, families were still being caught out. In January this year, Guy and Oksana Shahar, a couple who cared for their autistic son, Daniel, 15, received a letter from the DWP. 'Important,' it read in bold type. 'You have been paid more carer's allowance than you are entitled to. You now need to pay this money back'. The sum being demanded by the government was staggering: £10,180.45. Oksana, a dinner lady who had a zero-hours contract to do shop work in Sports Direct, was certain this could not be an earnings breach related to carer's allowance. As a carer, she had followed the unfolding scandal carefully and thought she was safe from its pitfalls. But when the letter from the DWP arrived, she realised the fine margins by which a carer could be ensnared in the debt trap. Oksana had overstepped the earnings limit by an average of £1.92 a week over a five-year period. In some weeks she was paid just 38p more than the threshold – but for that tiny infraction she is being forced to repay £64.60 each time, the rate of carer's allowance at the time. The debt, Guy said, would 'devastate us financially'. Almost 10 years on from La Rocca's warning to Devereux in the Preston car park, the letters are still being sent and carers every week are unknowingly falling into debt. So far 600 have been convicted in court and legal action against more is continuing. In April last year, Keir Starmer – soon to become prime minister – was asked about Groom's case on a visit to the north-west of England. 'Something has gone very wrong here,' he replied. 'We cannot allow that to happen again.' In October, Liz Kendall, Starmer's work and pensions secretary, vowed to 'put things right', and in December the Labour government announced an independent review of carer's allowance overpayments and promised a 'new settlement'. The Labour government has introduced some early changes to reduce overpayments being created by extending the earnings limit and promising to fully investigate 100% of earnings alerts. A DWP spokesperson said: 'We understand the huge difference carers make, as well as the struggles so many face. The carer's allowance overpayment rate is now the lowest on record and we are increasing funding and bringing in more staff to check 100% of alerts to help prevent carers falling into debt. 'But we want to go further. That's why we've launched an independent review of carer's allowance, to explore how earnings-related overpayments have happened and what changes can be made.' But for carers with debts to pay, and for those who may yet still fall into the carer's allowance debt, the promises of politicians have not left them any less vulnerable. Groom, who took care of her elderly mother until her dying breath, remains a convicted criminal, and her life inheritance now belongs to the state. The carer's allowance scandal – because of which 144,000 carers are repaying more than £251m – continues to claim victims and will do so for the immediate future as the DWP works its way through thousands of backlogged overpayments. The injustices and cruelty of the system may be with us for some time. The Shahars are appealing against the overpayment demand. 'It just seems so unfair that it's not even real,' said Guy, words that would undoubtedly echoed by hundreds of thousands of other carers. 'In any sort of ethical world, this would not happen.'
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
At least £357m in carer's allowance paid out in error over past six years, charity finds
At least £357m in carer's allowance benefit was paid out in error over the past six years due to official failures, resulting in debt and misery being inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people. The bulk of the figure relates to minor breaches of earnings rules by carers which the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was alerted to but did not check, allowing carers to run up huge overpayments over months and years. Carer's UK, which used new official fraud and error data to calculate the £357m figure, described it as an unacceptable failure by the DWP, which had years ago promised new technology would almost entirely eradicate carer's allowance overpayments. 'Given that unpaid carers were falsely assured that the problem would be largely resolved in 2019, they deserve better, and we've asked the government to strike off debts where they could have told carers sooner,' said Emily Holzhausen, director of policy and public affairs at Carer's UK. Carer Guy Shahar, whose family is being pursued by the DWP for £10,000 in earnings overpayments , described the £357m figure as 'shocking'. He called for the sum to be 'written off' given the department failed to stop the overpayments as promised. 'The DWP's negligence and failure to follow even its own low standards have led to this ridiculous situation that they promised to have sorted out years ago,' he added. 'They are making criminals out of the vulnerable families they are supposed to be helping, and piling unnecessary debt, hardship, anxiety and massive adversity on to them in order to avoid taking responsibility for their own failures. It would be much fairer to write the whole thing off.' A Guardian investigation into carer's allowance over the past year has detailed the horrific financial and emotional impact on carers of overpayments, but the latest figures also highlight the extent to which official failures meant huge amounts of taxpayers money was needlessly wasted. Tens of thousands of carers have unwittingly fallen foul of earnings rules each year since the DWP permanent secretary Sir Peter Schofield promised MPs in 2019 that new technology would eradicate the problem by preventing overpayments 'in some cases before they happen'. The verify earnings and pensions tool, known as VEP, introduced in 2018, was meant to enable DWP to swiftly check thousands of electronic alerts of potential earnings breaches by carer's allowance claimants each month. However, the DWP decided as a matter of policy to only investigate half of all VEP alerts, meaning breaches could go unidentified for long periods. This led to carers unwittingly running up huge avoidable overpayments, and typically having to repay sums between £1,000 and £5,000 but in some cases as high as £20,000. In the five years after VEP was presented as a 'solution' to the problems of carer's allowance, more than 262,000 overpayments totalling in excess of £325m were clawed back from carers, and 600 carers were prosecuted and received criminal records, according to the National Audit Office. Ministers last month announced they would invest £800,000 to properly staff the carer's allowance section to enable 100% of VEP alerts to be reviewed. This would enable overpayments to be tackled 'when they arise' rather than 'waiting until carers have built up large debts'. Carers UK's calculations were based on fraud and error data published by the DWP last week. The DWP report claims VEP has helped the department reduce levels of fraud and overpayment on carer's allowance since they were last measured in 2020. A DWP spokesperson said: 'The carer's allowance overpayment rate is the lowest on record. And we are going further by increasing funding and bringing in more staff to check 100% of alerts to help prevent carers falling into debt. 'We are absolutely clear that we want to eliminate waste and ensure people get the money they are entitled to, so we can invest in our public services as part of our plan for change.'
