Following The Leaders Council’s care campaign, which took place in the six weeks before Christmas, it was a great relief to hear some of the same issues debated in parliament last week.
During a commons debate on ‘the draft Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2023’, the employment minister Guy Opperman was asked about carers on several occasions.
He said that the carer’s allowance will increase by 10.1% to £76.75 per week from April. ‘Unpaid carers,’ he added, ‘also have access to support through universal credit, pension credit and housing benefit, all of which include amounts for carers. For a single person, the carer’s element in universal credit will increase to £185.86 a month from April, and the carer’s premium in pension credit and other income-related benefits will increase to £42.75 a week’
The carer’s allowance is the amount of money an individual can get paid if they care for someone for at least thirty-five hours per week. The trouble, of course, as was pointed out by several people during our recent care campaign, is that caring for someone for thirty-five hours a week makes it very difficult to do an additional job on top. And the amount of money received, even taking all of the figures cited above into account, does not add up to anything even approaching a minimum wage salary.
In addition, the biggest takeaway from our extensive investigation into the care industry, during which we conducted several in-person and online roundtable discussions, was that care workers were themselves severely underpaid and overworked. This means that people with a family members who requires full time care are faced with the choice of perhaps giving up work entirely, or shifting to part-time, at considerable cost to themselves, or attempting to secure a space in a care home where they know that the staff are underpaid and overworked.
Wendy Chamberlain, Liberal Democrat MP for North East Fife, also addressed the issues of the carer’s allowance. ‘It will not surprise Members that I want to talk about carers,’ she said. ‘I am pleased to say that my private Member’s Bill, the Carer’s Leave Bill, passed its remaining stages in the Commons on Friday and is off to the other place.
‘According to the Government, carer’s allowance aims to help carers keep a link with the workplace, but one challenge I had with my Bill was finding constituents who would benefit from carer’s leave, because so many of them had been forced to leave the workplace due to their caring responsibilities.
‘Simply put, carer’s allowance does not work. Carers need to be allowed to work more before they lose that allowance—that would not cost the Government more, but it would get more people back into work.’
The house also heard from Labour MP, and former shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, who paid tribute to Chamberlain’s comments before adding:
‘Some 8% to 10% of the adult population are informal carers; two thirds of carers are in employment—that is the whole point here; six in 10 of those who are caring for 35 hours a week or more are workless, which is three times the rate of those caring for less than 20 hours a week; and about 25% of informal carers are living in poverty, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s latest figures.
‘Another figure, which I believe she has quoted in the past, is that it is estimated that unpaid carers across the UK provide £135 billion-worth of caring in our society, and that largely falls upon the shoulders of women. It is now time to recognise the significance of the role that these carers play and the fact of the poverty they live in.
‘Let me make this suggestion: the unpaid carers I have met say that, like everybody else who works, they should be paid a living wage. They should at least get the minimum wage so that they can get by. At the very least, let us take the first step in that direction, which would be to recognise that maternity allowance is paid so that people can care for a child. Perhaps carer’s allowance should at least go up to the level of maternity allowance. If we can increase carer’s allowance in that way, it will enable at least some of those informal carers to be lifted out of poverty. I put that suggestion on the table for the Government to debate and for the Select Committee to look at as well.’
Parliament is now on recess but we will follow any developments with interest over the coming weeks and months.
Photo by tommao wang on Unsplash
