We clock up £19,000 worth of unpaid work a year

EVERY adult carries out £19,000 worth of unpaid work a year, a study reveals.

More than a quarter of the time we spend working for free is taken up with driving to our jobs or acting as a taxi driver to ferry children around.

The rest involves washing, cleaning, cooking, childcare or looking after frail and vulnerable older or disabled people, according to the Office for National Statistics report.

Unpaid household work in 2016 was worth an overall £1.24trillion, or £18,933 for every individual, it said. This exceeded the £1.04 trillion brought in by industry outside the finance and City sector – which includes manufacturers, utilities, accountants, law firms, hotels, transport companies, airlines, construction and farmers.

If the figures are broken down, household jobs such as cleaning would be worth £199,353million, and transport is valued at £358,350 million. Childcare would be valued at £351,734 million and adult care £59,453million. Although unpaid work is usually arranged privately, researchers said it was increasingly organised over the internet, where the working time involved and costs or rewards are hard to measure.

Online dating is among the valuable services that cannot be counted by traditional economic methods.

Researchers said: ‘Although not captured in gross domestic product, these measures are important for a complete understanding of how the economy is changing.’

About £1 of every £6 which would be earned in the household ‘shadow economy’ – £2,651 for every person – goes on consumer spending necessary to unpaid work, such as petrol, electricity, gas and food.

And a high amount of our unpaid work involves looking after people, usually family members, who need round-the-clock care.

About 2.2 million vulnerable adults were being cared for free in 2016.

The ONS said: ‘Adult care amounted to 7.9 billion hours, which would equate to the work of over four million adult social care workers working every week of the year.’