Young Carers Support

Gordon Marsden 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?

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[Gordon Marsden]

I am delighted to agree with the hon. Gentleman. Of course, the multiplier factor is very important, but it is also very important that young carers themselves do not get burned out. That is one of the key issues. It did not involve young carers, but I have a family history in this regard, in that my father cared for my mother for nearly 25 years; she had severe osteoporosis. Unfortunately, he would not take advantage of the things that were available, and I saw, in his latter years, how he was absolutely worn down by the process. Young people may not show that, but they have the same sorts of issues. When I tell hon. Members that 48% of those young people in Blackpool are caring for a parent because of substance misuse or mental ill health, they will get a sense of the sorts of issues that young carers have to face and deal with.

Last autumn, very important new research from the University of Nottingham revealed that the number of young people between the ages of 11 and 16 who act as carers has more than doubled since a comparable BBC survey in 2010. I was privileged to discuss those findings with people from the carers centre in my area, but also with two young carers, Caitlin Churchill and Claire Taylor, who had written to me over the summer with their personal experiences as well as with ideas to give young carers more support in the classroom.

The classroom is a key factor in this area. We have heard today about the need for Ofsted to be more forthcoming in this area, but school heads and schoolteachers also need to take the issue on board. They may not even know that they have young carers in their midst, and those young people, who sometimes turn up looking bleary-eyed and without having had a meal, may be disciplined for that, because they do not regard it as a caring thing; they think that it is just something they do for mum or dad or sometimes for an older sister or whoever.

That point is very important, as is the mental health project launched by Blackpool Carers Centre for young carers last spring. There have been workshops on this subject, and it is my experience that sometimes, when we bring young people together outside their school frameworks and put young people from one school or college with those from another, they work more collaboratively and do not feel as constrained. However, we need to ensure that the voluntary efforts and voluntary research by those young people outside school feed into schools and colleges as well.

The role of the local authority is also important. Blackpool is a small unitary authority, and I am sad to say that we have been hit very strongly by cuts over the last six or seven years, but it does support the carers centre.

[Albert Owen (in the Chair)]

Order. May I just say to the hon. Gentleman that he might want to bring his remarks to a conclusion?

[Gordon Marsden]

Yes, Mr Owen. The authority does support the carers centre, with a relatively modest amount of funding, so there we have it—a good example of people taking things forward. May I just say one last thing to the Minister? The role of young carers ought to be recognised not just by Ofsted, but in our thinking about bursaries and so on, and particularly when they want to enter higher education and apprenticeships.