Carers Week 2023
Navendu Mishra MP at a parliamentary drop-in for Carers Week 2023.
Monday 5th June marked the beginning of Carers Week, which is an annual campaign dedicated to recognising the vital social contribution made by people who provide unpaid care for relatives or friends with a disability, illness, mental health condition, or who need help as they grow older. It is difficult to overestimate the value of the labour performed by unpaid carers, equating to billions in savings for the government, or a second NHS.
I was grateful to be able to attend a Carers Week event in Parliament. I would like to thank all of the carers who attended for sharing their experiences and providing valuable insight into the hard work that unpaid caring responsibilities involve. I think that it is essential that politicians meet with and listen to carers to gain a better understanding of caring and the help and support that carers need.
Indeed, new research released for Carers Week highlights that this support does not go far enough. Half of the UK population have some experience of providing unpaid care to an older, disabled, or ill relative or friend, yet nearly three-quarters of these people did not identify themselves as unpaid carers. Moreover, nearly a third said that providing unpaid care had a negative impact on their health and wellbeing – this is approximately 8 million people. These figures suggest that as well as improving the quality and extent of support that is available to unpaid carers, we also need to widen accessibility to this support by ensuring that unpaid carers can be identified.
I thank Carers Week for drawing national attention to these issues. It is crucial that we continue to raise awareness of unpaid carers and press for the government to deliver action to provide them with the support that they need.
In the short term, I will be writing to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to ask what support his department is providing to unpaid carers in my constituency to help deal with the effects of the cost of living crisis. I will also be writing to the Department of Health and Social Care to hold the government to account about its decision to halve its pledged investment into the social care workforce, and the impact that this will inevitably have on unpaid carers.
In the long term, we must challenge the fact that successive Conservative governments have created a crisis in adult social care. Although our population is ageing and care demands are rising, funding for adult social care began to fall sharply after 2010. It is unpaid carers who have been expected to fill the care vacuum that this has created.
