Carers Allowance and HMRC helpline

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K-A-T-Z 13 right now. And support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed, is all you need. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, welcome to this Moneybox podcast. Taxpayers calling HMRC have been kept online for a total of 789 years in just 12 months.

40 million adults expect to have a poorer retirement because of the cost of living crisis. And what can you do with a £50 note if your local cash machine gives you one, but the local shops won't take it? But first...

Moneybox can reveal that the government is demanding a quarter of a billion pounds back from over 100,000 carers who say, who it says, earned too much and should have lost their carer's allowance. The numbers come from a parliamentary question this week. asked by the chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee, Sir Stephen Timms, who spoke to Moneybox about this issue just three weeks ago. Moneybox reporter Dan Whitworth has the latest, Dan.

Well, we'll examine those figures in more detail in a moment, Paul. But what we're actually really talking about here is people like Wren Seward. She works full time as well as being a full time carer for her husband, John. He relies on a wheelchair because of... severe osteoarthritis, a condition affecting his spine, his hips, his knees as well as severe anxiety which affects John's ability to leave home.

Now, after losing their teenage daughter in a car crash 10 years ago and just being overwhelmed with correspondence at the time, both John and Wren rarely open post apart from when they absolutely have to. So they do admit to missing letters from the department. for work and pensions but say the carers allowance system is so complicated they've been left having to repay more than five thousand pounds i am

repaying approximately £245 a month out of my wages that goes directly to DWP, and that's a direct charge. And the financial strain is placed upon our family. It's high. I can't deny it. It's played a considerable financial strain on us, which makes many of the things that we could do within the home to make John's life easier and generally the family's life easier, very difficult to access.

And I think that, I feel that a group of people like ourselves, disabled people, families that care for disabled people are a very vulnerable group and we're an easy target. because we're exhausted. We're exhausted trying to juggle the household, the care, the income and the bills.

Now, something else that we've learned also is that twice as many women as men are being chased for these overpayments. Now, that's broadly in line with the proportion of men and women who claim carers allowance, but nonetheless, still a stark statistic. Equality and Human Rights Commission has told me it's going to investigate. And just remind us then how these overpayments happen.

Okay, so unpaid carers who care for a loved one for more than 35 hours a week are entitled to receive £81.90 per week in carer's allowance. Alongside that, they're allowed to work but can only earn up to £150. take home pay per week, stray above that earnings limit and you lose the entire allowance. And that's often why it's called a cliff edge benefit.

But whilst claimants are obliged to tell the DWP about any change in circumstances, critics, like charities and a growing number of MPs, say it's incredibly difficult to avoid breaching that earnings limit. That's why critics say so many carers, those numbers again, 134,000 of them, are currently being told to pay back that £251 million. And what's the DWP had to say about this?

Well, in a statement, it told me the money owed includes historical debt, that carers allowance expenditure is forecast to be 4.2 billion this year alone. and that it's committed to fairness in the welfare system, with safeguards in place for managing repayments whilst protecting the public purse. Thanks, Dan. I'm joined now by Tom Royston, a barrister at Garden Court North Chambers who specialises in social...

security law. Tom Royston, as Dan said, these new figures show more than two-thirds of the carers who are being chased to pay back this money are women. Is this a case for indirect sex discrimination? Hi, Paul. The Equality Act says that every public body has to comply with the public sector equality duty. What that means here is that when the government makes a decision...

like, for example, the approach it will take to recovering overpaid carers allowance, it has to think about the equality implications. And what your figures show is that... the government's approach is affecting significantly more women than men. Has the government thought about the equality implications here? Well, we don't know.

What I can say, though, is that last time the Department for Work and Pensions were taken to court about their overpayment policy... they lost and one of the grounds on which they lost was that their policy didn't comply with the public sector equality duty and that case was about disability here you're looking at

sex as the predicted category. Yes, so maybe a question to ask them. Now, a quarter of a billion pounds overpaid 134,000 carers who often have very little money, as we know. If the department sees an overpayment, does it have to recover it? No, it doesn't. The law gives the department a discretion, a choice about whether it recovers or not.

If the Secretary of State said, for example, to all his staff, stop recovering this money from carers, it would stop the problem in its tracks? Yes, they could do that with a... the stroke of the pen. It doesn't require any change in the law. What we see at the moment apparently is a policy of more or less automatic recovery in every case where they decide there's an overpayment.

Yes, and certainly some of the letters people have had indicate that, I think. And people who get these letters, and they should all have had them, open them or not, I suppose, in some cases, they're being chased for overpayments. What should they do? Well, there's two things that they need to do. If they want to challenge the Secretary of State's...

discretion to recover an overpayment, they need to ask for that. So they need to write what the department calls a waiver request, setting out why they think that they shouldn't have to pay it back and of course in carer's allowance uh cases there's a very powerful argument that uh the fault is significantly the departments in not keeping proper tracks of what it knows about people's income and the benefit that people get is significantly outweighed by the loss of the

carer's allowance. And that letter that they write would have to be considered by a human, not sent automatically an automatic reply. That's right. People might well assume that they won't get asked to pay money back until... a human has thought carefully about their personal circumstances and that if they get a demand then it must be too late for them to say anything in fact unfortunately it looks like it's almost the opposite that the computer

splurges out a demand to repay an overpayment. And it's only if you specifically bring the factors why you shouldn't have to pay it back to their attention that they'll begin looking at it. And briefly, Tom. Is it possible some of these demands are actually wrong? Because it is complicated how your average earnings...

pension contributions and so on. If people think they're wrong, should they challenge that very briefly? Yes. I said there were two things people should do. The second thing is to check whether there really is a recoverable overpayment at all. specialist advice about that from somewhere like Citizens Advice. And there are quite strict time limits. So it's important that if you get a demand for overpayment, you have an expert tell you whether you really do owe it at all. Do it quickly and get...

proper advice from Citizensby somewhere like that, or a law centre. Tom Royston of Garden Court, North Chambers, thanks very much. Now, if you've got a question about tax and you call His Majesty's Revenue and Customs Helpline, this might sound familiar. Welcome to HM Revenue and Customs. The recent average wait on this line was 30 minutes.

Well, that's what the message we got when we called HMRC Self-Assessment Helpline this week. And those minutes add up. A National Audit Office report this week revealed that callers to the HMRC helplines were on hold for a total of... 789 years in 2022, 23. That's 10 whole lifetimes. Average waiting times in 2018 were just five minutes. Last year, the average was 23. And it's not just waiting times that listeners complain.

about when trying to contact HMRC. When you get onto HMRC site, there's this sort of five minute spiel which gets you nowhere and says there's a 40 minute wait on the line. It asks you whether you want to continue with the call. You basically say yes, and it cuts you off. That's happened to me three times.

And then eventually when I did get through, the call took me an hour and 13 minutes by the time I'd spoken to somebody and they dealt with the call. It was very, very, very difficult. Very frustrating. Don't do things on the internet because I'm not good with technology. So I'm very frightened, especially with tax people, of making errors.

What's going on at the moment is they're basically saying you need to contact them by digital means, but I only ever contact them if there's something that can't be resolved digitally. When you can speak to somebody, they're very, very helpful. but it's actually getting to them that's the problem. If you try and try and you sit there for an hour and then you get cut off, it's deeply frustrating.

It also seems to me to be counterproductive because if you want people to pay their taxes, then for goodness sake, make it a little bit easier for them to pay them.

Well, however you define customer-friendly, that surely is not it. On the same day the critical National Audit Office report came out, the Treasury announced £51 million in new funding to, as it said, bring HMRC's phone line service... back up to target, but will it? Conservative MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton Brown is the Deputy Chair of the Commons Spending Watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee, which has also investigated HMRC's helpline service. How did he react to the new report?

Well it's pretty shocking isn't it and it follows on from the PAC previous inquiry in February 24 which we concluded the overall level of customer service was the worst ever. And it looks as though it's getting worse. This is not a good look for an organisation that is highly customer-focused and is collecting around £900 billion of our money. Yes, and these are people who are not ignoring their tax. They're trying to sort it out and pay the right amount.

How should they be treated? As you say, the vast majority of their customers are honest, decent people just wanting to sort out their tax affairs. And the problem is that the HMRC spent about $882 million. are employing 21,000 full-time equivalent advisors, and they're planning to cut that even further by 14%. cutting out another 950 staff. So, you know, the service is likely to get even worse still. And I think my main plea on your programme is for the Treasury.

to re-look at their targets and allow them to continue to at least employ the present number of staff until they can improve the service. On the day the National Audit Office report came out, though, the Treasury did say... Not by coincidence, I'm sure, but it's going to give it £51 million in new funding, ring-fenced funding. As it said, bring HMRC's phone line back up to target. Is £51 million going to do it?

Well, it's a good start. And I think what we really need to see, I think, is the present number of staff continuing to be employed and the present number of staff trained so that they don't continue to make... some of them the errors that they do, because we're seeing quite high error rates, and improve the customer service.

Of course, the Inland Revenue are trying to divert people away from the phone towards digital services. That we understand. But what they're doing in some instances is literally people phone up. They're told to go and look at the digital services, be it the app or the payment bank, individual claimants bank. But then they're cut off with a message saying, no, you must do these things without any opportunity to speak to anybody.

Yes, we heard that from some of our listeners who've been in touch with us. And of course, there were other listeners who said, look, I can't go online. I don't have an app, a mobile phone with apps. They're the ones, really, who've got to have a phone line, and yet they're waiting, on average, HMRC says, 23 minutes, which is a long time. And indeed, the National Audit Office worked out that... British public spending nearly 800 years on hold last year.

Yes, the people who are likely to be affected by this are the most vulnerable in our society, the elderly or the sick, who are, for one reason or another, have access to a computer or whatever it is, the signal in their rural area might not be good enough. And HMRC surely should provide a reliable service.

not only for the bulk of the people who want to do it digitally, but for the minority who really have to use the phone, they should provide an efficient phone service system. And I believe you're going to have people from HMRC in front of your... Committee in the next few weeks, what will you be saying to them?

34 million individuals, 5 million businesses and 7 million benefit payers to pay their tax through HMRC to the government. The least that the HMRC could do is to provide a convenient and sympathetic service. to enable the taxpayer to do that efficiently and on time. And the report makes clear that the taxpayer losses caused by taxpayers not being able to take reasonable care has gone from 8.1 billion... in 2019-20 to 10.7 billion in 2020-21-22. So both HMRC and the Treasury

should really take notice of that before they start exacting cuts. So by spending some money, they could actually bring in more. Is that what you're saying? I really believe that's the case. I think you've got to spend the money to make customers be efficient in paying. their tax. Sir Geoffrey Clifton Brown, HMRC, told us...

Whilst customer service standards on our phone lines are still not where we want them to be, we're making strong progress in our efforts to improve and encourage people to use the app wherever they can.

Now, the cost of living crisis is not just affecting how we live now. It's also affecting how people prepare for their future. That's indicated by figures given exclusively to Moneybox by the Pensions and Insurance Mutual Royal London. It found that three quarters...

of the people surveyed said the cost of living crisis has affected their retirement plans and that would represent 40 million adults. The survey also indicated 13 million people expected to have less money when they retired and over two and a half million had already delayed retiring, typically by four years. Our reporter Sandra Hardiel asked people in Stockport what they were saving into a pension.

I don't think so. If something comes up and I could save something, that's it. But I won't do anything special for that. So you're working and you're 26. Are you contributing into your pension? To be fair... I don't think I receive a pension or anything like that. Or maybe I do, I'm not sure. I've not looked into it. When do you want to retire? When I die. That's the retirement, that's what I think.

I don't really know how it would work with me because I'm self-employed. So I guess it's something that I need to research more, but I don't think too much about it at this age. I mean, how do you approach saving for retirement? I don't. I wouldn't mind to retire if I could afford to.

I've had a heart attack so it's a case of the quicker I can finish work the better because of what I enjoy my life, what life I've got left. I'm not in any rush to retire I'd like to just keep going at the pace that I'm going and then when I feel like I'm not doing it anymore then yeah I'll think about it then.

Well, not much enthusiasm about pensions among the people in Stockport there. Listening to that is Sarah Pennells. She's Consumer Finance Specialist at Royal London, which did that survey. Sarah Pennells, not so much affecting their retirement as rejecting the whole idea, but tell me... Tell me what your survey asked and what you found.

Yeah, as you said, we've been looking at the cost of living crisis for the last two years and doing sort of surveys every six months. And it's well known that it has been affecting people's day to day finances. But we wanted to look at how it's affecting people's longer term financial resilience.

you say we found three quarters of people said that their plans had been affected now that varied from people saying that they thought they might have less money or they were focusing on today's expenses through to those who'd pushed their retirement back and while that was actually actually a very small percentage, only one in 20.

For people who maybe have caring responsibilities or those who are in ill health, that could be a real problem. Yes, I mean, about one in five said they made cutbacks elsewhere to keep paying into their pensions, but a similar proportion said they prioritised...

paying bills over paying into pensions because the bills have to be paid. That's right. So obviously the day-to-day household bills do have to be paid but we have found that very few people have actually stopped or reduced paying into their pension. And that's been a very consistent picture over the last two years.

This lot of research, we found that one in 17, so about 6% of people of working age, said they'd either stopped or reduced the amount they were paying into their pension. Now, there were some differences in that. So people who are self-employed were... is likely to do that compared to people who are employed, for example. But I think although...

You know, these are very tough times for people. The danger of stopping your pension contributions is you could just end up with a 20-year cost-of-living squeeze in retirement. Yes, indeed. Now, we have auto-enrolment now, of course, which means everybody earning more than £10,000 a year is automatic.

enrolled into a pension. But that doesn't begin until they're 22. Employers pay in less than employees. The amount going in is generally very little, less than 8%. And yet you need about 20% to have a decent pension. changes to those restrictions.

Yeah, we think that automatic enrolment is kind of unfinished business and reducing the age at which people are enrolled to 18 and ensuring that employers are paying contributions on what's called the first pound. So there's not this sort of gap between... people's wages and the amount that gets the contributions, those will be welcome changes. But we also think there should be a

an open and honest debate about how much goes into pensions. Now, this isn't the time to ask people to pay more money into their pensions when costs are so high, but we know that any change in contributions will take... a number of years to come in. So we do think we should start talking about this openly and honestly about what are the benefits, what are the potential costs of getting both employers and employees to pay more in.

to give more people the kind of standard of living they would like in retirement. Yes, we heard from the Pensions and Lifetime Saving Association on Moneybox a few weeks ago that you needed £31,000 a year to have what they call a moderate income. to save an awful lot for that aren't you? But let me just ask you this in the last...

for a few seconds. People who are listening, who are worried they're not paying enough for their retirement, they can't really afford to put a lot more in. What advice is there for them? How can they get more in there? A couple of thoughts. Firstly, it's not too late, so don't despair. Secondly, if you're in a workplace pension scheme, maybe when you get a pay rise, see if you can pay some or all of that in.

by increasing your regular monthly amounts. Ask your employer if they do something called employer matching, where they will match your contributions pound for pound up to a certain percentage. The same if you get a bonus. Now, most bonuses are paid at the start of the year, but maybe you'll get one for this year. Could you pay some or all of that into your pension? There are steps you can take and there are lots of independent and free tools to help you.

Sarah Pennells from Royal London, thank you very much. Thank you. Now, there are more than four and a half billion Bank of England notes in circulation, but what if you're unlucky enough to get one the shops don't want to take? Here's Moneybox listener Peter. I went to an ATM and I needed £100 because I go to dance classes and usually pay in cash. I was given a £50 note and two 20s and a 10. And I was very surprised about the £50.

note. When it comes to an ATM we have no say as to the denomination of the notes. It's quite hard to spend a 50 and shops don't have to accept them. It just makes life more difficult. So I went to my local co-op. They were happy to take the £50 note, but the assistant had to call the manager and two other members of staff came over with electronic machine to test if the £50 note was genuine.

but I had to buy some products. Well, that was Peter. Sandra Hardiel's here with us. Sandra, Peter was given a genuine £50 note, but he said it was hard to spend it. Can shops that accept cash refuse certain banknotes? It's all legal tender, isn't it?

Well, legal tender doesn't mean that you can spend this money where you like. For a start, what's classed as legal tender varies throughout the UK. English banknotes aren't legal tender in Scotland, for example. But the Bank of England says this term doesn't really mean much. everyday life because actually it's only mandatory to accept legal tender if someone's paying off a debt. So shop owners can accept or refuse whatever they like including £50 notes.

Yes, so that might be cash only or card only. It's all a matter of discretion. In fact, the Bank of England's website says if your local corner shop decided to only accept payments in Pokemon cards, that would be within their rights too.

Cash machine operator Link told us the number of £50 notes dispensed through ATMs is low and you're more likely to get one if you're asking for a high amount or in wealthier locations. So if you're lucky or perhaps unlucky enough to get a £50 note from a cash machine and it's... refused by some shops, what can you do?

Well, like Peter, you might find a shop willing to accept it after they've checked it's real. Otherwise, you should be able to exchange them in a bank, building society or post office. Thanks, Sandra. So, how much change would you get from a £50 note from... if you downloaded the Moneybox podcast.

Two twenties and a ten, because it's free. There was one listener once said to me, well, you get what you pay for. Thanks a bunch. Much more helpful, of course, was Peter's email about the £50 note, and you can help set our agenda as he did by emailing your 50 or... million pound note questions to moneybox at bbc.co.uk. We do read them all. And remember, you can hear Moneybox first and live on BBC Radio 4 every Saturday at midday. Much more exciting that way.

In this podcast, our team, who I believe we're paying in Pokemon cards this week, were reporters Dan Whitworth and Sandra Hardy, your researcher Joe Krasner. The studio manager is Tavey James, our editor was Sarah Rogers. I'm Paul Lewis and this was... the BBC News Money and Work production for BBC Sounds. And now, dive, dive. OK, he's coming in underneath your...

He was underneath us and that's when he came and rammed into our left wing. A collision between a Chinese jet and an American spy plane. We flipped inverted and we're in an inverted dive with no nose, explosive decompression and severe problems. With relations between the West and China increasingly strained, what are the chances of things spinning out of control? The Western world was asleep and it's had a rude awakening.

I'm Gordon Carrera. In Shadow War, China and the West, from BBC Radio 4, I'll be exploring the friction in this most important of relationships and asking, has the West taken its eye off the ball? Well, unlike many of my colleagues, I don't talk about what's discussed around the cabinet table. I'll be speaking to politicians, spies, dissidents and those caught up in the growing tension. You cannot ignore China. Listen on BBC Sounds.