We neglect unpaid family carers at our peril

The Government has to do more to assist the millions of people looking after elderly and sick relatives

Politicians talk a lot about social care, and rightly so. Funding residential and domestic care is a national necessity. It’s also not enough. The formal care sector matters, but far more significant are the people caring for their relatives and friends. Without this army of unpaid informal carers, now 7.6 million strong, social care in Britain would collapse.

You might think that caring for relatives is such a natural part of life that it barely needs commenting on, but the growing scale of informal care means it is now an issue of urgent public interest. At the Social Market Foundation (SMF), we have calculated that the number of informal carers grew by more than 1 million since 2005.

By “carers”, we don’t mean people who look in on an older relative every few weeks. We mean people who devote extensive time to basic necessities, helping relatives to dress and wash and eat. The average family carer now spends 19.5 hours each week providing care. In all, family carers provide 149 million hours of care each week. It would take 4 million full-time care workers to provide that amount; last year, there were only 1.45 million paid care workers in England.

So when ministers later this year publish a Green Paper on how they propose to fund the formal system of care provided by local councils and other public bodies, they really should talk about family carers too. Not least because the burden that care puts on families will only keep growing. An ageing population means the number of older people needing informal care will rise by more than 60 per cent over the next 20 years.

How do we manage that demand? The first requirement is honesty. Politicians are often wary of addressing some of the questions that arise from family care. How much care should families be expected to provide for older relatives? How much of the duty to look after older people should fall on their families, and how much on the state? How can employers do more to support workers who care? Few are prepared to state the obvious truth: the whole system is predicated on the expectation that families will stretch themselves to breaking point to look after older relatives.

The impact on family carers will be set out in an SMF report with Age UK today, which shows how carers sacrifice careers, earnings, health and happiness to look after relatives. Most carers – 4.45 million – are women. Lots of men care – more than 12 per cent, or 3.2 million – but they tend to be older and more likely to be caring for a wife or partner than a parent. The majority of those trying to juggle a job with looking after a relative are female.

For many, the balancing act proves impossible. Only half of family carers also have a paid job; many are forced to give up work altogether. Those that hang on in employment are paid significantly less than similar colleagues without caring duties.

Some might shrug and accept that as a harsh fact of life, but both economic self-interest and basic fairness demand a better offer for women trying to combine work and care. Doing nothing while the growing burden of family care drives more women out of the workforce is a waste of talent that will eventually cost taxpayers dearly as those women miss out on earning and building up pensions. It could also reverse the drive towards equality in the workplace that business leaders, politicians and, above all, women have fought for in recent decades.

Making it easier to work and care must be a key objective. Responsible employers know that flexibility for parents is the best way to support and retain workers; better treatment for workers who care should be the next goal. Today, barely 40 per cent of big employers even have a formal policy on how to support working carers; such policies should be mandatory.

As the debate about gender pay has shown, government can nudge employers to do better. The social care green paper should consider the case for “care pay gap” reporting, where employers state publicly how much less they pay staff who care for relatives – and why.

The scale of the care challenge means that families will always have to shoulder much of the burden. The question politicians must face up to is how that burden can be carried more fairly and sustainably.

James Kirkup is the director of the Social Market Foundation