I would like to start this article off with a personal anecdote from my childhood.

For more than a decade, my mum has been an unpaid carer for my grandparents. My mum has dedicated herself to ensuring that my grandparents are cared for, in good health, and that their every need is provided for.

Growing up, I never really understood what the role my mum had as a carer entailed. That was until the pandemic hit, and I became my grandfathers unpaid carer.

I realised that caring for someone and being a carer are two very different things. While the former is something we all do, as there is always someone we care about, being a carer transcends that. It means being on duty twenty-four hours a day, needing to spring into action regardless of your health. It means staying on top of a loved ones medications, ferrying them to and from the doctors, and often having to be the translator whenever my grandparents hearing falters. It means making £83 last an entire week for both the person you care for and yourself. Throw a whole family into the mix, and that ever-decreasing allowance dwindles to virtually nothing.

During the time that I was a carer, my mental health hit rock bottom. I was anxious all the time, worrying about whether my grandfather had enough to eat and drink, whether I had given him the right tablets on the right day, and whether he was feeling happy. For an entire year, my life became focused entirely on his well-being and on whether I was doing enough to ensure his needs were met. I had gained weight from stress eating, and any leisure time with friends over Zoom had vanished, as I would often need to rush off to perform my duties at a moments notice.

The story of my mum is not unique. According to Carers UK, there are approximately 5.8 million unpaid carers in the UK, with 1.7 million of those carers providing fifty hours or more of care. This care saves the UK economy £162 billion per year in England and Wales alone, with Northern Ireland saving £5.8 billion and Scotland saving £15.9 billion.

According to government guidelines, a carers responsibility lasts at least five hours a day, totalling thirty-five hours a week, and they are given an allowance of £83.30 a week as compensation for the work they do and the costs they save the NHS.

There are two significant issues with this. Firstly, even if we were to agree with the government that a carers role is simply “roughly thirty-five hours of work a week”, then the carers allowance provides a carer with £2.38 an hour. For context, an apprentices wage is the lowest wage rate someone can earn in work, which is £7.55 per hour.

Secondly, a carers role extends well beyond “roughly thirty-five hours of work a week”. An unpaid carer works twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They cannot afford to rest, in case their loved one is at risk of harm or requires assistance.

With this information in mind, the governments recent decision to cut benefits will only further harm carers. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) green paper, “Pathways to Work”, looks to cut £5 billion a year by implementing austerity measures within the welfare system. While the DWPs analysis suggests that 250,000 people will be pushed into poverty by the reforms, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has stated that the actual figure is closer to 400,000. The Trussell Trust has published new research, too, suggesting that 77% of people claiming Universal Credit (UC) have gone without essentials in the last six months, while 43% have skipped meals to cover essential costs over the previous three months. 

Another benefit also set to be cut is the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), designed to support those facing poverty, even if they are working.  Currently, 1.2 million carers have their allowance tied to PIP, with an estimated 650,000 carers set to lose their allowance due to changes in the qualifications for PIP. With 1.2 million carers already living in poverty, and a further 400,000 in “deep poverty”, the impact of these changes is significant.

There has been pushback against these measures, however, with more than 100 of the UKs most high-profile disabled people calling on the government to scrap the cuts, along with money-saving expert Martin Lewis claiming the cuts will have a “catastrophic impact” and up to 170 Labour MPs rebelling against the green paper. 

The outrage from the numerous anti-poverty campaigns, pressure groups, and even the governments MPs demonstrates that these cuts will have a devastating impact. While the economic costs of caring are clear, there are the invisible costs: mental health, a lack of social life, the ostracisation of living on benefits; the latter, I might add, being a result of years of politicisation and not from any real inherent issue of having to rely on the state for support.

Thanks to my mum, I am one of “the lucky ones”. I had the opportunity to return to full-time work, which my mum fully encouraged. These days, I work in higher education, in a permanent job and with much better working conditions than being a carer ever allowed. But this has left my mum caring for both grandparents, while only receiving an allowance for one; yet another invisible cost.

While I still do what I can to support my mum and grandparents, by way of caring for my grandfather on days off or providing financial support with bills and shopping when the allowance does not stretch far enough, it breaks my heart to see the strain placed upon my mum, with no support being offered from the government. And yet, if you were to ask her, my mum would tell you she would happily care for my grandparents, time and time again.

A carers empathy is unparalleled. In the case of my mum, it is the belief that her parents cared for her as a child, and so she is now doing the same for them, rather than relying on the NHS or the state.

The question remains: what needs to be done to reform the current care system positively? Carrying on as if nothing is wrong is unsustainable and unfair to the unpaid carers who are in dire need of real support. From personal experience, the first significant issue that needs to be addressed is the Carers Allowance. Expecting carers to survive on less than the bare minimum, while balancing the needs of those they care for with their own, is unrealistic and unjust.

My proposed solution is to raise the Carers Allowance to match the London Living Wage rate of £13.85 an hour. As demonstrated earlier in this article, a carers work does not fit the typical “nine to five” framework and is a vocation that completely absorbs your life. The compensation that is both needed and deserved, for the money carers save the NHS and the country as a whole, should reflect this.

Raising the capital to fund such an increase in the Allowance could come from taxing gambling organisations in the UK. As highlighted by Harry Quilter-Pinner in his article for The New Statesman, online casinos in the UK currently face a 21% tax, which is lower than the rates in Austria (54%), the Netherlands (40%), or the US state of Delaware (57%). Mr Quilter-Pinner highlights that, through stricter regulation on multiple aspects of the online gambling industry, the government could raise an extra £2.4 billion in revenue. Coupled with this, research suggests that a 1% tax on individuals with a wealth of over £1 million would raise £147 billion.

Unpaid carers perform a duty to the nation that should not and cannot be understated. Whether it is caring for a relative, an elderly person, or someone with a disability, the facts remain the same: a carer needs to be on hand every single day, at any time. Successive governments have failed to compensate them with an allowance that provides them with dignity and reassurance.

It is time to end the care crisis.