Carer’s Allowance

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Bardell. I am immensely grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) for securing this important debate. Across the country, millions of people make enormous sacrifices to care for the people they love. Looking after somebody in need of full-time care too often means giving up on work, friendships and so many of the ordinary opportunities that the rest of us take for granted.

Our country could not have survived the pandemic without the determination and resilience of unpaid carers. While doctors and nurses battled to save lives and as the virus engulfed care homes, which this Government unforgivably failed to make safe, millions of ordinary people stepped up to assume additional caring responsibilities and to paper over the cracks that have been inflicted on health and social care by successive Tory Governments.

In 2020, the campaign group Carers UK estimated that unpaid carers collectively save the nation £530 million in caring costs every single day of the pandemic. We owe them all a debt of gratitude. Nobody should be forced to resort to credit card debt or payday loans to cover the cost of care, but that is the terrible reality facing so many unpaid carers today. Unpaid carers have found themselves cruelly exposed to the catastrophic impact of soaring food and energy costs, with heating their homes and powering essential medical equipment becoming a daily struggle.

Last year, more than a third of carers reported having to cut back on luxuries, with more than one in 10 taking out additional debt just to make ends meet. Even before the energy cost rise again this week, many unpaid carers found themselves in the position of nothing left to cut. I was recently contacted by a constituent in a state of utter desperation. Having dedicated her entire professional life to caring for strangers in the NHS, she was forced to leave work to care full time for her husband. Now she tells me that, after paying bills, she is left with just under £40 to get by, and does not know how she will keep up with mortgage repayments.

Last week’s spring statement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer was an opportunity to take meaningful steps to help unpaid carers survive the most dramatic cost of living crisis in recent memory; but instead of increasing the carer’s allowance and other benefits in line with inflation and heeding Labour’s call for ambitious action to cut energy bills, he put his own political ambition before the needs of millions of people and brandished his Thatcherite credentials to win over disaffected Tory Back Benchers, with a commitment to shaving a penny off income tax in two years’ time. How does the Minister think that will help unpaid carers in my constituency who are barely getting by here and now?

We have heard plenty of warm words from Ministers at the Dispatch Box about the invaluable contribution that carers make. We have seen countless photo opportunities of Ministers meeting carers in their constituencies, or standing on the doorstep to applaud them during the darkest days of the pandemic, but that will not put food on the table or coins in the meter. It will not provide the slightest reassurance to unpaid carers in my constituency, who are genuinely petrified about whether they will survive the punishing months ahead.

The virtue signalling must stop; what we need is action. That means dramatically increasing the pitiful rate of carer’s allowance, so that millions of households are not drowned by soaring prices; dramatic action to cut energy bills for the worst off and most in need; and, following the example of the pioneering Labour Government in Wales, introducing a one-off payment for unpaid carers to help see them through this Tory cost of living crisis.