To think carers allowance rules are punitive and unfair

[UprootedSunflower]

Carers can claim carers allowance if they earn less than £151 a week, an equivalent annual total of £7852.

Last year I earned £5012. In my job my pay is irregular piece work through a casual contract. I have no control over the processing of claims, some are paid fast and passed on through my employer and others skip months. My employer has also made multiple payroll errors, delayed payments, part payments moved to the next month or back pay.

carers judge my earnings monthly, as I’m paid monthly. I don’t ever actually work over £151 hours a week/ £654 a month but due to my employers being all over the place I’ve had things like no pay one month, then double pay the next. I go over the limit for claiming.

Ive been told it doesn’t matter when I work, they judge the pay days.
it feels so unfair and punitive, I wouldn’t be in this low paid job if with such as disregard to my pay check if I wasn’t a carer.

…seems your issue is with your chaotic employer

The problem is with your employer and their useless way of paying you.
Can you not get them to sort it out so the payments are properly spread out? Do they understand that their incompetence costs you money??

I can’t fix this though.
Ultimately if you try to work a bit as a carer to top up and survive you can only do work which is casual, very part time and you won’t be a valued employee. You aren’t going to work anywhere wow, let alone have a career. I don’t have other options.
This is the reality I think for the majority, and outside the hands of the employees.
Carers could EASILY relax their onerous rules. Why would it be any different to allow people to use the tax year to claim? Or make allowances of say three months? It’s not like I’d be taking home more money.
My employer has no consequences at all for acting as they wish, so why would they change their behaviour? The consequences are mine alone

Ultimately I’m very part time, and there’s more like me. What’s their motivation to change the system. In their view they pay me, they don’t get the fuss.

There are two issues here. The chaotic employer is one of them, but the carers allowance system itself is also punitive, cliff edge bollocks and we should do better.

Well it would be easier to fix a useless employer, than a benefit that's paid to hundreds of thousands of people,you seem to be getting g angry at the wrong person here .

To be clear- my workspace is not acting outside the law with not consistently processing my pay as a casual employee. They do pay me for all work, there’s no contract that actually says there needs to be a consistent cut off that is the same each month.

I’d say it’s the opposite. Taking on the entire gig economy would be a massive societal change, especially including all casual workers and their rights and those on zero hours contracts is already proving to be a problem Labour can’t solve as they promised.
Billions of pounds, companies, lawyers are currrently tangled up.
its a huge huge problem in society.

Changing a rule on caterers allowance would be piss easy in comparison. Just say carers can be calculated weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually as appropriate.

Carers’ unpaid labour looking after others is completely exploited and that leaves many women in poverty. It’s shameful.

Carers' allowance needs to be both dramatically increased and reformed, chiefly by removing the cliff edge and bringing in a taper instead.

The gig economy also needs to be reformed - this is going to be a lot more difficult.

I am so sorry you are in this situation.

I though you could get carers allowance monthly ?I get it paid weekly ,but I'm sure there was.an option of having it paid monthly when I first started claiming it.

Dramatically increasing carer, s allowance won't help those that claim it along with universal credit, as its,a taxable benefit so whatever cits increased by people will lose in universal credit.

I'm sorry, it is crap.
Most on here are unlikely to understand that the big issue at the center of this is how non direct piece work gets paid, as well as the added chaos a crap employer can bring.
Even if your employer did things in a timely manner, how they get money for piece work will always be erratic, and that problem is always passed on to the worker.

Piece workers are working on the margins, in what is called precariosity work. (Not looking down on it, I do plenty of it myself as a disabled worker not on UC)

I don't have direct experience but gather it's the same for self employed disabled people on UC too.
Doesn't matter when they did the work, and they find themselves unable to offset serious expenses, so it becomes financially nonviable to do more than 'hobby work' and be topped up by UC for a living, instead of building a business that might allow them to come off it, and even earn enough to need to claim CA where applicable either.

mine is monthly, as I have monthly pay checks. They are so inconsistent though.
This month an unexpected early payment meant I was 38p over the threshold so I’ve lost a whole months allowance and I have to reclaim, as an example

It says on the gov UK website that they can average out earnings if you earn more than 151 one week. If you have been turned down can you not appeal?

I thought they could be averaged out too

TTBOMK they will only do this for people who have a pattern to their payments. It excludes piece workers and self employed automatically, as well as often chaotic employers.

So someone who earns £100 in the first two weeks every month, and £190 the 2nd two every month, will qualify. Someone without a regular pattern of difference even though they may actually be earning far far less than the above example, wont.

You can average it to monthly if you have monthly pay checks.
My monthly pay checks are inconsistent when work is applied and is often concentrated into one month, and not the next. I earned 38p over the limit this month as an example. Another month a pay check wasn’t processed and rolled into the next. Another month my pay was corrected over a long period with back pay.
Say I have earn £654 a month. That’s set in my pay check (not options, that sets it).
I do £300 worth of work in October and £450 in November.
In the office a claim runs late for October and £100 rolls into November making it £550. Then December is quick, so some makes the November pay. November is now £670 and I’ve lost the careers without expecting it. Simply as one claim was slow and one was a few days faster. With piece work that’s normal.
My average pay is still well under, but I will sometimes loss the benefit depending on when the third Friday of the month is, or if a piece of work is delayed, or someone was on annual leave for a week and it was added later. All normal stuff

Could your employer be more organised if you approached them? I get carer's and submit monthly pay claims. I don't ever earn more than about £450 a month, mainly because I keep a cap on my work it so that I don't approach the limit and run in danger of losing a month's carers. You are supposed to be able to average it out, however I have never approached the Department for Work and Pensions because I don't want to 'poke the blob' and get into a whole lot of additional admin/communication/different people every time I call them.

If your pay is issued monthly from an employer that is the period set.
If your pay is weekly that is the period set.
I don’t know about self employed

Hence the need for reform to change the rules on UC so that this does not happen.

I do think that criticism of Labour's failure to reform the gig economy is a tad premature after two months in power.

They do need to change it so that it's not a cliff edge loss. Carers save the government millions in looking after people who would otherwise fall to the state.

Have a read around it- there’s big back tracking already.

The problem with changing assessment to say the tax year, or quarterly, is that then really the carer’s payment would also need to be paid annually, or quarterly, once they know if you are entitled or not. And very few people would be happy to receive their payments less frequently. It’s a tick box “have they satisfied the threshold- yes/no, pay yes/no”. If they assess quarterly then they’d also pay quarterly.

You need to take this up with your employer to ensure you are paid properly for the time worked.

This thread and my feelings are partly triggered by the fact it’s so so hard to resolve things and they hang over you.
I declared a pay check in august 2023 with back pay. They’ve only now requested pay checks and evidence about it. I’ve had letters, replied, had two phone calls after the reply was lost, re sent it and am waiting. You just can’t relax. I presumed after all this time it was ok. All they’ll ever say is ‘a decision maker will be in contact’
I know this month is 38p over, I’ll declare it, they’ll probably still pay next month and I’ll have no contact for a long long time then they’ll do a massive review of the entire year, decision makers will ring me every time when I’m in the bath, they send more letter and texts about missing a phone call and I’m end up down an anxiety rabbit hole whilst having no sleep with a disabled child and catastrophising being chased for benefit fraud.
That’ll sound like I’m mad to most, but it sends you there over time. I struggle to function half the time on a basic level and the war over evidence and being called gets to me.