It is now just shy of two years since my Private Members Bill, the Carers Leave Act, received Royal Assent, and a little over a year since the necessary regulations passed to enact the legislation. It came after years of work by dedicated campaigners, both inside and outside of parliament. But the job isn’t done just because the law is passed; employment rights are only useful if they’re known about, enforceable, and solving their intended policy issue. That is why I held a Westminster Hall debate last week – to discuss how the law has been working for unpaid carers over the past year, and how it has not.
According to the latest census data from all four nations, there are at least 5.8 million people providing unpaid care for an ill, older or disabled family member or friend. Of these, 2.8 million were recorded as balancing their caring responsibilities with working. The value of this to our economy is £162 billion per year, that is to say that our “careforce” is massive and needs valuing and supporting alongside every other industry.
Despite this, we also know that, statistically, being an unpaid carer makes you worse off. I hosted a policy breakfast earlier this year with the Centre for Care at Sheffield University who have been doing incredible research on this. They found an average relative income gap of up to 45% for those informal carers providing the most hours of care. Sadly, this academic research confirms what we knew already from the surveys carried out by organisations like Carers UK, that unpaid carers are more likely to live in poverty. Doing something altruistic for the people you love makes you worse off financially, which is why we must ensure that carers receive, at an absolute minimum, the leave rights they are entitled to.
The State of Caring survey for 2024 found that 40% of respondents had had to give up work, finding the juggle unmanageable, and of those still in employment 44% had reduced their working hours and a quarter had moved to a more junior role. That leaves the vast majority of unpaid carers with less money in their pockets every month. It is also important to note that this doesn’t just create immediate poverty, but it is also about tackling poverty amongst pensioners, especially women, who are still more likely to be unpaid carers, and are more likely to subsequently reduce or stop working as a result.
The struggles which lead to people stepping back from work are entirely understandable. Caring is hard – it is tiring, stressful, time consuming, and it doesn’t neatly fit into our free hours of the day. There will always be pinch moments where care arrangements need changing, extra hospital appointments need attending, or where all the tiny acts of care and admin for your loved one just cannot be fitted in and around work. This creates the risk that people are using up their own holiday to carry out caring responsibilities.
That is what the Carers Leave Act was aimed at solving, or at the very least, helping. The first legal rights to take leave from work, for caring. My big worry though, particularly in the first few months after the regulations passed, was that the Government was not doing enough to tell businesses about the new rights and what was required of them. Only three quarters of organisations responding to a Carers UK survey had told their employees at all about the new right, and the organisations responding to the survey were already more likely to be tapped into carers rights than those who didn’t respond. This tallies with other research from Carers UK which found that only two thirds of working carers know about carers leave. Even for those who know about the right, 15% of respondents to the State of Caring survey said they were worried about a negative reaction to taking time off for caring. I think this shows quite clearly that we need to be doing more to ensure businesses know about carers leave, and that carers know what they are entitled to and feel comfortable to request it.
During the debate, I was really pleased to hear that the Shadow Minister for Business and Trade is supportive of paid carer’s leave, and I felt encouraged by the Minister for Employment Rights’ confirmation that there is now a cross ministerial working group on unpaid carers. I hope that this means we are a step closer to an unpaid carers strategy and towards paid carers leave.
Two years on from the passing of the Carers Leave Act and there is still much to do
