Supporting Carers

Tracey Crouch Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2010 Westminster Hall

[Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)]

This is not my maiden speech, but it is the first time that I have spoken in Westminster Hall and under your chairmanship, Mr Benton, and it is an honour to be doing so in this debate.

I want to speak briefly to signal my interest in the important issue of supporting carers. I am not an expert, a carer or a mother, and my parents are, thankfully, still physically and mentally well, so I literally have no personal experience of caring for anyone. However, in the past few years of being a candidate, and now as an MP, I have met many people who care or have cared for loved ones, and that has opened my eyes to an area of policy, a set of issues and a group of almost invisible workers who need our support.

The first carer I met in my constituency was a man called Maurice. He wrote to me about dementia and his views on the service that his wife had received. When I went to see him, I asked him to explain what had happened from start to finish. The point of the story that had most impact on me was when he started to tell me how his wife had ended up in full-time residential care because he could no longer cope with caring for her. This brave man, who has served his country and who now fights and fights for improved health services for other local people with dementia, welled up in front of me as he recalled his guilt when he realised that he could no longer care for his wife. Although so many parts of his story needed attention, it was that very point that made me wonder why he had felt so alone and unable to cope. What help had he received? Where was the support network? It might well have been there, but if a man who wears a military badge with honour suddenly realises that he cannot cope, something is not quite right.

I appreciate that caring for someone with dementia is difficult and that dementia is not the only condition that requires full-time care. To learn more, I recently visited the Medway carers centre, which is run by the Princess Royal Trust for Carers. There are 21,000 carers across the Medway authority, which includes the Chatham part of my constituency, but only about 5% of them are known to the centre, which demonstrates, as all of us in the Chamber know, that a huge number of carers out there are forgotten, unrecognised and probably inadequately supported.

I had the good fortune to meet some carers who were at the centre on the now departed caring with confidence course—I would welcome an opportunity to speak to the Minister further about his announcement about that in his opening remarks. As I spoke to those carers, a number of things became clear. The first supremely obvious point was that carers come from all backgrounds—rich, poor, male, female, old and young. Requiring care does not discriminate. I met carers who looked after their husbands and wives, and a carer who looked after her mentally ill son. I met a carer who looked after her mother and her children—she was part of the sandwich generation that the Minister mentioned. I met a carer who looked after two disabled children, but who never had a day off because respite services would take only one of them at a time.

That leads me to my second point: no two carers are the same. They might share experiences, but their needs are often very different, so the support for them needs to be flexible so that it recognises those different needs. As the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) mentioned, what a young carer needs is very different from what a senior carer requires. We talk a lot in policy terms about flexible working for carers, which is welcome, but many carers require flexible living, and respite care is still patchy. Supporting carers’ physical and mental well-being is essential if we are to help them to carry out their role safely and effectively.

Although direct payments are excellent in principle, we still need to ensure that carers are supported so that they can make the right budgetary decisions. The carers I met were genuinely anxious about becoming, in their words, “self-employed business men”. The fear of doing the wrong thing and making the wrong decision should not outweigh the benefit of giving carers more control and purchasing power. There are agencies and charities that can help, but the signposting needs to be strong and available at the earliest possibility.

I made it clear at the start of my speech that I am no expert and that I would talk only briefly. I have only a new interest in this issue as a result of meeting so many dedicated carers recently. As someone who will turn 35 shortly, and who is at the start of what I hope will be a long political career, I cannot begin to comprehend how other people suddenly change their lives to care for a member of their family or a loved one. However, I am sure that I would join the 6 million carers who do that if I needed to.

Of course, people who care for their loved ones often want to do so, but they do so more often because they need to. When I think of the many young carers who give up playing on their bikes or going out with their friends because they need to look after mum or dad, or of the working woman who gives up her job to wash and bath a parent who struggles to remember her name but can recall the time she bought a loaf of bread, my heart breaks for them. Carers really are the unrecognised heroes of society, and it is our responsibility as a Government to do as much as we can to support them.