Young Carers Support

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. I echo the sentiments already expressed in both interventions and speeches, including the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield). If I may say so, responsibility for the questions he posed to the Minister does not sit only in the Department for Education but across Government. If we are serious about this issue, the need to break out of those silos, and perhaps to have a cross-departmental take on all this, is really important.

I will speak principally on the excellent and enormously positive work done in Blackpool, often by our carers centre, which is of long standing. I have had the privilege to work with the centre over my 22 years as the local Member of Parliament, and particularly with its young carers. Over the past 12 months, the centre has supported 666 young carers. Let us bear in mind that this is—I will not say that it is the tip of the iceberg—certainly not the actual number of young people caring for a parent or family member in Blackpool. Various surveys over the years have suggested that the figure is anything between 2,000 and 3,000, which gives some sense of the scale of it.

The other thing about Blackpool, which is also an issue for many inner-city areas and other seaside and coastal communities, is the degree of double transience—of families coming into the town and of people moving within the town, often because of family break-ups or economic hardship. That means that the ability of people who need care to latch on to a local community is much reduced on what it might be in other parts of the country, which puts even more pressure on the work of those young carers.

Nevertheless, the good news from Blackpool is that there has been tremendous progress in the last few years. I have been privileged and very proud to be part of that. In 2016 we all got a little bit of BBC showbiz dust sprinkled on us, because the BBC’s “DIY SOS” programme, which some hon. Members may be familiar with, descended on Blackpool to transform a building, Blenheim House—which is in the constituency of my parliamentary neighbour, the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), but which serves the whole of Blackpool—into a young carers centre. Literally hundreds and hundreds of volunteers came from across the community, and I, along with some of my councillor colleagues, lent my hod, as it were, by clearing rubble and doing general labouring tasks in the morning. I also pay tribute to the Beaverbrooks Charitable Trust—the local charity and local business that provided the property and has supported the centre very strongly ever since. It is invidious, when one thinks about the work that is done by young carers and the carers associations that support them, to single out lots of individuals, but I do particularly want to single out Michelle Smith, who has done extraordinary things with the centre and everything that has been taken forward from it.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is paying fitting tribute to the organisations in his constituency. Will he join me in recognising the work of volunteers, particularly the volunteers who assist in my constituency, Gloucestershire Young Carers, because it is their contribution that means that the work can reach so much further and change so many more lives?