How wedded are you to dh-make-perl? Ubuntu isn't my primary distro but I do use it sometimes and have had success using checkinstall to build debs from perl dists. It is not perl-specific so it won't hold your hand so much but the only niggle I found when using it was having to escape perllocal.pod from the list of updated files manually. There was probably a way around that but it was never enough of an issue to go back and fix.

You can use apt to install checkinstall from the Trusty repos (but don't hang about as you've only a few months left of LTS on that one). Good luck.