Furthermore, the influential Commons Public Accounts Committee says the bureaucracy of the target culture at JobCentres means work advisers are not given enough incentives to help carers find part-time work, which they can fit around their caring responsibilities.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) pays around £2bn a year in benefits such as the Carer’s Allowance and Employment Support to 915,000 people, who look after relatives and other loved ones. Five years ago, the number was just 700,000.

Across the UK, it is ­estimated there are six million unpaid carers, who look after sick and disabled family and friends. In Scotland, the number is 660,000, whose caring work saves the Scottish economy £5bn, almost the same as the cost of running the NHS north of the border.

The main carers’ benefit, the Carer’s Allowance, is £53.10 for a minimum of 35 hours a week or £1.52 per hour; this compares to the national minimum wage of £5.73 per hour.

The committee’s report points out that around one-fifth of carers who receive benefits say they experience difficulties claiming. These include understanding the information provided by the department and also what information they are required to provide.

MPs highlight anomalies in the system whereby “ ‘underlying entitlement’ means some carers have to apply for Carer’s Allowance even though they are not eligible for it in order to receive ‘top-up’ payments of Carer’s Premium and Additional Amounts”.

They continue: “Complexity is also caused by the interaction of carer’s benefits with benefits received by the person for whom they care. This is because receipt of carer’s benefit can reduce the cared for person’s benefits.”

The report says that carers who want paid work do not receive support tailored to their circumstances and that the DWP’s communications with them can be “lengthy and difficult to understand”.

The cross-party committee notes that only £25m of the £38m earmarked last year for employment support for carers has so far been committed and warns that the other £13m should not be diverted elsewhere in the JobCentre network.

In further criticism of the system, the report points out how the DWP is “unable to assess the effectiveness of its work to reach eligible carers and groups such as ethnic minorities as it does not know the benefit take-up rate”.

Publishing the report, Edward Leigh, committee chairman, said: “Millions of people devote a large part of their time, often for many years, to caring for family or friends who are ill or disabled. But the value of the service they provide is not reflected in the quality of the DWP’s arrangements for providing them with financial support.”

He continued: “Carers who apply for benefits should not have to wade through official written guidance and communications that can range from the hard-to-understand to the downright incomprehensible. And they should not have to be jumping through unnecessary hoops to apply for benefits and allowances.”

The Conservative back bencher noted how some carers wanted to combine their caring work with paid employment yet Jobcentre Plus had “hitherto simply not been geared well towards providing this kind of help”.

Mr Leigh explained: “Staff work with a rigid template that does not help them to assess and respond to the inevitable complexity of carers’ circumstances and availability for work. And the Jobcentre Plus target regime does not give personal advisers incentive to provide customers with part-time work.”

He added: “Last year, the department said it would spend ‘up to £38m’ on employment support for carers and indeed some two-thirds of this sum has been committed. But, at a time of rising unemployment, the worry is that the remaining third will be diverted away from improving services for well-deserving carers.”

JobCentres: Target culture