Tackling the unpaid carer crisis could provide respite for trailing Tories

In the wake of last week’s local election drubbing, the Tories need all the help they can get. Fortunately, much needed respite could be at hand from an unlikely segment of the electorate.

The nation’s unpaid army of an estimated 10 million carers are the vital backbone of our country’s care system. Their regular care contributions to their friends, neighbours, and loved ones help to prevent a system already under strain from buckling. It is clear from recent polling, however, that decision makers have failed to recognise and reciprocate this contribution, leaving many carers in crisis.

The overarching figures show that unpaid carers feel let down and unsupported by successive governments, while also suggesting that a large proportion of this sizeable cohort of voters are so desperately in need of support and help that they would be willing to vote for almost any party that offered it. With the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats languishing in the polls, the political opportunity for the forthcoming general election is obvious.

The polling, commissioned by GoodOaks Homecare to support our You Are Not Alone campaign, found that 56 per cent of carers believed the government was ‘ineffectively’ supporting those providing unpaid care across the country. A mere six per cent thought the government was doing a “very” effective job.

The analysis suggests that this political apathy is an after-effect of real-life issues. When our poll probed carers’ wellbeing, the results were stark. More than half felt unable to meet their own health and wellbeing needs. The vast majority of these – 87 per cent – appear to be sacrificing the wellbeing of themselves to meet the needs of those they cared for. Nearly 1 in 10 felt unable to meet the wellbeing needs of either themselves or their loved ones.

How carers had specifically felt in the week prior to polling laid bare the impacts that a lack of effective support mechanisms can have. More than 60 per cent felt ‘stressed’ - a 50 per cent increase on the statistics of the wider public in the same period. Unpaid carers were also more than twice as likely to have felt lonely than the wider public.

It’s clear that carers place the need to address these issues at the forefront of their political priorities. Nearly two-thirds (65 per cent) said they would be “likely” to change their vote in favour of a party that proposed the introduction of further support measures. Less than 10 per cent of respondents said the opposite. It would be no surprise if this flexibility generated interest from a government searching for popular policies that might help to bridge the polling gap - particularly when unpaid carers could represent more than 6 million active voters.

But such decisions should hardly be deemed as a choice. It is clear they are a necessity. Of course, there are several support options currently available to unpaid carers, but to the majority, as these figures show, these are simply nowhere near sufficient to meet immediate need.

Proving a further stumbling block is a widespread lack of awareness of what these options are and what they mean. This is a fault of policymakers failing to communicate effectively. Our polling found, for example, that just 12 per cent of unpaid carers felt they had a “good understanding” of the newly introduced Carer’s Leave Act legislation. It is difficult to see, therefore, how the Act’s aims of improving carer finances and wellbeing can be fully realised given its lack of presence in carers’ psyche.

Though the Carers Leave Act proved the least well-known of the support options presented in the polling questions, other options including Carer’s Credit, Personal Independence Payments, Attendance Allowance and NHS Continuing Healthcare were well understood by less than half of all respondents.

There is evidently a visible – and concerning – crisis of wellbeing and awareness among Britain’s family carers. A concerted and deliberate effort to address these issues is needed, and needed now.