Millions wasted, lives blighted: time to put an end to the carer’s allowance scandal

Changes will be complex and expensive, but so is the moral and economic cost of not resolving this sorry tale of misery and injustice

• Key workers quit jobs to avoid cash penalties for breaching carer's allowance
• DWP threatened to send in bailiffs': the unpaid carers told to repay benefit

The carer's allowance overpayments scandal is surely one of the great public policy failures of recent years: a tale of official negligence and cruelty that has seen hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money wasted while causing untold misery for tens of thousands of vulnerable carers.

These avoidable failures, the dismal human impact of which is succinctly illustrated in Monday's Carer's UK study, will not come as a shock to Guardian readers who have followed our reporting of the scandal in recent months, or to the new ministerial team at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).