A former unpaid carer has urged welfare officials to 'get their act together' after they continued to pay him carer's benefit for six months after the death of his husband, potentially landing him with debts of more than £1,300. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

Chris Farrell, 65, who claimed carer's allowance for four years while providing full-time care for his late husband, repeatedly tried to get the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to stop paying him the £86.45 a week benefit. Farrell said his anxiety over the growing benefit payments in his bank account – and uncertainty over whether he would be punished despite following the rules – had left him distressed and unable to move on with his life.

The DWP said on Friday it would write off Farrell's overpayment – meaning he does not have to pay back the carer's allowance income paid to him as a result of official error – after the Guardian approached officials with details of his case. The Guardian is aware of five other cases where carers said they were unable to stop carer benefit payments despite informing the DWP that they were no longer caring and neither wanted nor were eligible for the benefit.

Cases identified by the charity Carers UK include: a carer who has accumulated more than £2,000 of unwanted carer's allowance since their mother went into a care home 10 months ago, despite contacting the DWP five times; a carer who found it impossible to stop payments despite reporting over a year ago she had taken on a new work contract, resulting in overpayment of more than £2,650; and a man who has been unable to stop the benefit after finding a new job.

Helen Walker, the chief executive of Carers UK, said: 'Despite doing everything expected of them, carers continue to receive payments they know they are not entitled to with no clear information about when, or if, recovery action will begin or how much they will ultimately owe.'

A Guardian investigation has revealed hundreds of thousands of unpaid carers were unfairly landed with hefty debts in recent years after DWP system failures meant they unwittingly ran up repayable carer's allowance overpayments. An official review of carer's allowance last year found DWP backlogs and record-keeping issues led to carers being sent overpayment notices because their reported changes in circumstances, made months or years earlier, had been ignored, deleted or lost. The review, by disability rights expert Liz Sayce, recommended the DWP refund carers penalised by record management failures. The DWP agreed, but is yet to set out plans on how it will do this, or estimate the cost of repaying affected carers.

Farrell, a podiatrist who lives in Gloucestershire, said he had called the DWP's bereavement line in December and was assured his husband's state pension and attendance allowance would be stopped, but the carer's allowance continued. He plans to donate the money to a food bank.