Social Care (Local Sufficiency) and Identification of Carers Bill

Debate between Laura Sandys and Hywel Francis

Friday 7th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)]

It gives me great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aberavon (Dr Francis), in particular because of his history; he has been involved in the carers agenda for many years. I am pleased to be a sponsor of the Bill. The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), who introduced it, has a huge track record on social care and carers.

The issue of carers not only impacts the constituents of every Member of Parliament; there is probably not one MP who does not have a friend, a friend of a friend, a cousin or other family member who is caring or very close to somebody who is. Carers permeate every part of society, and every socio-economic and age group. For that reason, it is crucial that carers legislation and policy are taken extremely seriously.

I am pleased that the Government have taken the initiative to develop a White Paper that, for the first time in many years, deals with the gritty, extremely complicated—it does not lack pain—policy on long-term social care. We are facing a big problem in this country and globally. Carers are very much at the heart of how the policy needs to develop and evolve. In many ways, they are front-line troops.

The legislation and media coverage is all about care homes—the scandals involve the institutional support for people who are not well—but the important thing is what happens behind closed doors, and we need to address the quantity of people who need care and support. Those people are in some ways hidden from the system. They are invisible to the authorities, but they need both recognition—they need to know that we know and respect them—and practical support. We need policies to ensure that they are given the support they need and deserve because of the sacrifice that they are making.

Support for carers is a crucial long-term health care policy, but it hit me personally and changed my life. I was 17 when my father had a massive stroke and it changed our life dramatically. I was going to go to university, but I went out to work as a dispatch rider. My mother’s life changed dramatically. I did not go to university—I helped her to care for my father. Over the five-year period that it took for my father ultimately to die, my mother probably aged by about 15 years. That is the example of my life, but those things are happening around the country. People who are frail and have health problems find the moral responsibility of caring both physically and sometimes financially extremely difficult.

My experience changed my life and certainly my education, but it also taught me of the extraordinary self-sacrifice around the country. The issue of young carers is very important. I have done a lot of work in my constituency with them. The Bill needs to ensure that local authorities and all institutions around young people look to identify those who take responsibilities way beyond their years. I go regularly to a young carers group. The young children in the group look and behave as though they are older than their age. That is fantastic—they are maturing and taking extraordinary responsibilities—but caring changes how they grow up, including their access to a social life. They age before their time.

I make the situation clear to my local schools, but I am very lucky because they have taken a lot of personal responsibility to identify those young people. I appreciate, however, having listened to other Members, that some schools and even some people in social services do not understand the dynamic of these households and the additional responsibilities being put on these children.

Identification is extremely important for another slightly more controversial reason. A teacher in my area said to me, “Although the parents of some of these children have been ill, they are no longer ill but have become dependent on the child delivering care services to them.” There are all sorts of issues within this pathway of being a young carer that need to be identified so that support can be provided. We need to ensure that schools, social services and the institutions around these young people understand the issues, and we need to ensure that clear action is taken to alleviate the situation of children providing support to parents who have entered into this relationship of dependency.

[Dr Francis]

The hon. Lady talks about lessons and is making a powerful case, but however much we sympathise with carers, surely the real lesson is that there is no substitute for legislation.