I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper) on securing fourth place in the ballot for private Members’ Bills and choosing this important topic. I commend her on her excellent work. She deserves our thanks for raising awareness of this issue. The Bill and this debate enable us to shine a spotlight on the increasing challenges that many unpaid family carers face.
I want to talk specifically about carers and their finances, but first I want to add my perception of an unpaid carer to the comments we have just heard from the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope). Almost everybody in the sector counts carers who receive carer’s allowance, which is only £62 a week, as unpaid carers. I do not think many of us would think of £62 a week as payment. The term “paid carers” tends to refer to care workers. Apart from my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq), we have not touched enough on carers’ finances and how they manage, but it is important that we do so. If a Bill, such as this one, would defray costs for a group, it is essential that we understand whether they need that help, and I will argue that they do need it.
The Bill has the full support of the Labour Opposition, and despite the many negative comments I hope that it receives the backing it deserves from both sides of the House. We have heard some rather curmudgeonly comments about the Bill, but much of it deserves our backing, and I hope it will get it. It would exempt carers who receive carer’s allowance from paying hospital parking charges in England. This is an important issue for those unpaid family carers, many of whom make regular trips to hospital with those they care for. The right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) carried out research in 2014 and found that people are having to pay anywhere between £11 and £131 a week in hospital parking charges. As I mentioned, these carers get a carer’s allowance of £62, so clearly any week in which they clock up £131 in hospital car parking charges would be a rather frightening time.
One of my constituents, Patricia, tells me:
“My husband is disabled and I am his carer, we can sometimes have two appointments in a day at Salford Royal Hospital that can take up to five hours. The fact that disabled people have to pay car parking charges is disgraceful. Hopefully sometime in the not too distant future the people who have decided on these charges will see the error of their ways.”
When she spends six to eight hours at hospital, she pays £6 to park.
Carers Trust also cites the example of Rachel, who was a carer for her husband, who had Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and type 2 diabetes. The combination of his conditions meant regular trips to hospital so that her husband could receive the healthcare he needed. Owing to his dementia, Rachel stayed with him on the ward to feed and clothe him and calm him when he became anxious, and nurses and doctors were grateful for her support and the insights into her husband’s condition she could provide. Over the final five weeks that her husband was in hospital, she paid out £120 in car parking charges. To Rachel, having to check every day that she had put enough money in the meter seemed like a cruel punishment for providing care for her husband in the NHS.
Rachel’s experience is not uncommon. As many Members have said, there are over 6 million unpaid carers in the UK, and the thing to focus on is that they take a great deal of pressure off our healthcare services, but despite this great contribution, many carers are now deeply concerned about extra charges for care and about losing the support on which they rely because of Government budget cuts. Caring for someone else can be overwhelming and demanding, and can have a significant impact on the carer’s own health, on their finances and on their work and career. We know that carers can find that their incomes fall dramatically if they have to work fewer hours or leave work to care. According to the Carers UK “State of Caring” survey, almost half of the carers who responded said they were struggling to make ends meet. Of those, four out of 10 said they were cutting back on essentials, such as food and heating; almost four in 10 said they were using up their savings; and one in four said they had to borrow money from family and friends.
We are talking about carers struggling financially and now finding themselves cutting back on food, dipping into their savings or even borrowing money, and then they find they have to pay these hospital parking charges. Charging carers to park at hospitals adds stress to their lives and takes money out of their purses and pockets. It is no way to reward those unpaid family carers for the vital contribution they make to the NHS.
In a speech to the Local Government Association annual conference in July, the Health Secretary talked about the role of carers and about people taking more responsibility for their family members. He talked about developing a new carers strategy that examines what more we can do to support existing carers and the new carers we will need. This measure is one of those things that we could be doing.
If Health Ministers want to increase the number of family carers, which will be essential, they must consider the impact that caring has on a carer’s income and their future financial security. They should be arguing for carers to be exempt from some charges. The 2010 Government report, “A Vision for Adult Social Care” acknowledges that carers are the first line of prevention. Their support often stops problems from escalating to the point where more intensive packages of support become necessary.
Carers need to be properly identified and supported. Indeed, failure to identify and support carers has serious implications both for the NHS and social care services, but there are many indications that cuts to services have caused, and are causing, mounting pressure on carers. The Minister and I have stood across the Dispatch Box from each other only once before today, but he recently told the House in answer to Health questions:
“I do not think that carers’ invaluable contribution to society has ever been better recognised.”—[Official Report, 13 October 2015; Vol. 600, c. 156.]
I was surprised to hear that comment, and I am sure that many carers and many carers organisations were surprised, too. I feel that the reality is very different from the picture the Minister sought to convey. I can tell him that many carers actually feel unsupported, unrecognised and singled out by the Government’s austerity measures. With cuts of over £4.6 billion to local authority budgets, adult social care support has been reduced or removed in many areas, with many people now paying higher charges and depending on unpaid family carers to cover the shortfall in care.
Financially, unpaid carers have been hit by Government cuts and austerity measures in ways that I feel they should not have been. Around 5,000 carers have been hit by the benefit cap, and at least 60,000 have been hit by the bedroom tax. I brought forward a Bill to exempt carers from the bedroom tax, but the Government and some Conservative Members who are present opposed that sensible proposal.
The hon. Member for Christchurch raised the issue of tax credit cuts. It is becoming clearer that hundreds of thousands of carers in receipt of carer’s allowance and working tax credits could be hit by the Government’s proposed cuts to tax credits, yet many working carers rely on them. Carers UK gives the example of Michelle, who is a lone parent who cares for her son, Jake, who has cerebral palsy. Jake receives disability living allowance and, as his carer, Michelle claims carer’s allowance. She also works three short shifts at a local supermarket each week and is paid just over the national minimum wage. As she works 16 hours and is on a low income, she is also entitled to working tax credit alongside some child tax credit.
Michelle, in common with many carers in her situation—even some Conservative Members seemed concerned about parent carers such as Michelle—finds it very difficult to get the right specialist support for Jake outside school hours, so she cannot increase her hours of work. Jake often has hospital appointments, which also means she cannot take on any more work. If the tax credit changes due in April 2016 were in place now, Michelle’s income would be reduced by over £1,400 per year. As well as losing that £1,400, Michelle would have to continue to pay hospital car parking charges when her son has hospital appointments. That goes to the heart of the point raised by the hon. Member for Christchurch.
Is the Minister content to see a working family carer have her income reduced by £1,400? Carers on carer’s allowance are already caring for 35 hours a week or more, and they cannot be expected to take on more hours to try to make up the loss. I hope the Minister is fighting on behalf of those working family carers and making sure that the Chancellor considers them when he is looking at measures that might mitigate the tax credit cuts. If there is no protection or exemption from charges for carers, they might feel that the Government are turning their backs on them and taking for granted the support they provide and the benefit they bring to the economy.
Age UK’s report, “Briefing: The Health and Care of Older People in England 2015” paints a very clear picture of the current climate in health and social care. Since 2010, 400,000 fewer people are getting the care they need, so the reliance on unpaid family carers will be ever greater. An estimated 1.6 million people currently provide care for 50 hours plus per week, which is an increase of 33% since 2001. Over the next five years, around 10 million people will become carers, so support for carers and help for them to manage their finances will remain big issues.
Carers UK says:
“The growing cost of providing good quality care and support to an ageing population with more complex care needs means that putting in place the right support for carers is both a way of limiting the rise in care costs and a way of supporting carers to have a good life balance”,
to which legislation states they are entitled. As more of us are living longer, one in five of us will become a carer
to a family member or a friend in the future, and that care role needs to be supported, financially, socially and in the workplace.
During the long hours I have been sitting here, a number of carers have commented on the debate via social media. One described some of the remarks that have been made today as
“a disgraceful and childish reaction to a very sensible Bill”.
Another said that the remarks were “shameful” and “insulting to carers”. Others said
“I’m glad this is being discussed”,
but that it was
“such a shame this issue is being degraded”,
and that the debate had brought the House into disrepute.
Carers also made very specific comments about Conservative Members, saying that they are “out of touch” and should be reminded that carers allowance is only £3,229 a year. One spoke of spending “a fortune” on parking
“for my son’s medical appointments both routine and emergency”.
Many observed that there seemed to be a suggestion that carers would abuse the free parking, which was deeply resented.
Carers’ lives can be made easier by relatively small changes. Ministers have so far turned down the case to exempt them from the bedroom tax. Exempting them from car parking costs is a simple but effective measure, which would show them that we understand the social, financial and emotional difficulties that are associated with caring. It is a small gesture that would show carers that we value their contribution to society. I commend my hon. Friend’s Bill to the House, and I hope that the Minister and all other Members will give it their support.
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