Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answer of 9 November 2015 to Question 14774, what data his Department holds on the number of voluntary carers in the UK; and if he will make a statement.

We take voluntary in this context to mean informal unpaid carers – those volunteering to care in a formal capacity are not included in these statistics which are set out below.

Data on provision of unpaid care from the 2011 Census was published by Office of National Statistics (ONS) on 11 December 2012. This showed that there were 6.5 million carers in the United Kingdom.

On 15 February 2013, the ONS published an article with the results of further analysis of the data, which shows that the overall number of unpaid carers in England and Wales has grown by 600,000 since the 2001 Census (approximately 5.8 million people, representing just over 10% of the population).