Member News
By Paul Burstow - 5th February 2010
Unpaid carers – those who care for frail, sick and disabled relatives and friends – save the UK economy a staggering £87bn each year.
Many, like George who cares for his wife with MS or Trudie who cares for her father with dementia, come into our surgeries desperate with the struggle, over months and years, to juggle their job and caring responsibilities, often at the expense of their own health and well-being. How can they, and the rapidly increasing number of carers in our ageing society, be helped to remain in employment?
Most working age carers – over half of the UK’s 6 million carers – do want to work, and for more hours, not least to reduce the poverty many of them suffer. And more than half of those carers not currently in work would like to work, but can’t because of poor services for their loved one, a lack of flexible working, and inadequate benefits, which combine to make many carers poor – now and longer-term in retirement.
We need a two-pronged attack to support employed carers. Firstly, a radical improvement is required in the quality, relevance and availability of more tailored services, with advice available 24/7 – enabling more carers to leave their relative or friend with confidence whilst they are working. In 2007, only about a quarter of working carers felt they had adequate support from formal services to enable them to combine work and care. The Transforming Social Care agenda aims to generate greater choice and flexibility, with funding delegated to those needing care.
The process needs to gain the confidence of carers through rapidly ensuring more holistic and integrated support from councils’ social services, primary care trusts, hospitals and good quality private suppliers. Regular, thorough and funded carers’ assessments must be a routine step in this more integrated system, and also involve better understanding of, and respect for, the carers’ role by health professionals.
The health sector in particular needs to recognise and invest more to support the key preventative role of carers, whose own health and well-being (a key issue in the 2008 National Carers Strategy) rates only in the lowest tier of government priorities for PCTs. Yet their health underpins their continuing support for their loved one, saving considerable sums in the longer term for the NHS.
Ministers should insist that the £150m they announced nationally as funding “for carers” over 2009-11 actually reaches them. If PCTs don’t believe carers are a priority in their area – evidence suggests most did not this year, diverting their carers’ allocation elsewhere – it should be bid for by social services and NGOs to spend on what it was meant for.
Secondly, we need to make the economic case to employers – both public and private – that sufficient flexibility in the workplace enables carers to work and care, slowing the rate at which carers leave the workforce to their own financial and social detriment, and that of employers who lose their investment in skilled and experienced staff.
More than two-thirds of carers outside employment said their caring responsibilities had caused them to leave paid work. Meanwhile, carer-friendliness was estimated by employed carers at only 52 per cent, 68 per cent and 78 per cent in the private, public and voluntary sectors respectively.
Parliament introduced the right for carers to request flexible working in 2006, but three years on DWP research showed half of those entitled to it did not know of this right. BIS should monitor take-up of the right, as well as the volume and reasons for refusals, to see if it is working as Parliament intended. Anecdotal evidence suggests a significant number of refusals, with carers continuing to be forced out of jobs.
So government should publicise this right robustly, despite the economic downturn, for the longer term interests of society and our economy.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd