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Journalists honoured for their ‘enraging and heartbreaking’ coverage of the carer’s allowance crisis The Guardian journalists Patrick Butler and Josh Halliday have won the Paul Foot award for their coverage of how vulnerable British carers were taking to court for accidentally claiming the allowance alongside part-time work. The pair uncovered how carers were prosecuted even though many had tried to report their earnings to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). 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”. In the five years after the verify earnings and pensions tool, known as 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. In the case of one man, who was convicted for over-claiming 30p a week, the DWP has since acknowledged he made an innocent mistake. Labour has now set up an independent review of the allowance and raised the earnings limit for those claiming it. The 2025 awards ceremony on Tuesday was hosted at Bafta by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, who said: “Who cares? This is the big question in Britain at the moment and the winners wrote brilliantly about these very people.” Continue reading...