ROOF Blog

A poll on the pressure of being a carer has found than three out of four of them have reached breaking point. The most common cause was with the bureaucracy of accessing NHS care and benefits, but the poll found that for many the burden of the carer role was so great that some people have had breakdowns and others attempted suicide.

Charities including Carers UK, Mencap and Alzheimers Society are among nine charities which have drawn up a carers poverty charter calling for better benefits for carers. The charities estimate that six million carers looks after family members or friends at home, but fewer than 500,000 carers actually get the allowance. They want an increase on the weekly carer’s allowance of £53.10, and greater support.

Families with disabled children feel alienated from their communities and suffer because of a lack of services, a new report from charity Contact a Family says. More than 65 per cent of those questioned said they believe understanding and acceptance of disability is poor and described feeling stigmatised and shut out. A further 40 per cent said they lacked support services such as access a key worker, or childcare, and 64 per cent said they did not feel valued by society in their role as a carer.

Meanwhile, the government is looking to recruit 60 European social workers, experienced in ‘social pedagogy’, to lead an experimental pilot programme on the way children’s residential care homes are run. The practice helps children ‘develop and flourish’, rather than just meeting their immediate needs and ensuring their safety. Child care advisers welcome the move, but say its success would need more money being invested in residential care homes and in training staff, with one person saying that without trained and skilled workers, residential care was tantamount to ‘warehousing’ children.

Working grandparents would be entitled to two weeks of ‘granny leave’ after the birth of a grandchild, and entitled to tax credits, if the charity Grandparents Plus have their way. It is calling for the government to give grandparents an entitlement of two weeks’ leave, to be taken at any point in the child’s first year, receive credits towards their national insurance contributions, and to extend the childcare tax credit to grandparents who provide childcare to help parents return to work. A spokesperson for Grandparents Plus said that 14 million grandparents provide £3.9 billion in childcare yearly.

The government unveiled its plans to get one million people off benefits and back to work yesterday. The plan, to ‘transform’ the lives of people currently on benefits, was launched by work and pensions minister James Purnell who said benefit claimants would have to play their part in the economy either with some form of work or in preparing themselves to find work in the future, or face losing some state payments. Only carers, jobless parents of very young children or severely disabled people would be exempt.

Following a ruling by the Employment Tribunal yesterday, millions of carers will have the right to claim against employers who discriminate against them in refusing to offer flexible working. The worker was forced to resign because she wanted to spend more time to care for her disabled son and launched a ‘discrimination by association’ claim. The result has paved the way for approximately 2.5 million people in Britain who are carers as well as maintaining jobs will be entitled to the same treatment as other staff.