Young carers deserve equality before the law

This week is national Carers Week (10 to 16 June), intended to heighten awareness of carers across the country and the challenges they face. However, as our special report highlights, the sad fact is that, for whatever reason, young people who provide care for a parent or sibling go under the radar. As a result, their needs go unrecognised and unmet.

It is claimed that the official census figure for the number of carers aged under 19 in England, at 244,000, only scratches the surface. This is partly because many children and young people who care for a relative do not recognise themselves as carers since they know no different. It might also have something to do with a stigma about such a role with their peers.

The outlook for young carers in general is not good. Clearly, some will fare better than others, but evidence points consistently to a familiar cocktail of symptoms and poor outcomes: stress, anxiety, depression and sleep loss, leading to lower school attainment than their peers and poorer training and job prospects. And that is before you consider how much young carers have lost out on their childhood.

The government is rightly strengthening the rights of adult carers as part of the Care Bill to help ease access to support. But the reforms do not apply to young carers. A group of organisations led by the Carers Trust has been campaigning for a duty on to be inserted in the Children and Families Bill for local authorities to identify, assess and provide support to young carers in their area. They also want the Care Bill to recognise that meeting the care needs of an adult is vital in order to protect the wellbeing of a child or young person in the household, so they do not take on the full burden.

Young carers tend to fall through the cracks between children’s and adults services. The problem is that children or adults often get supported in isolation, whereas care and support needs to sustain the whole family. It is simply staggering that young carers should not enjoy the same rights as adult carers. As well as protecting childhoods, their needs must be addressed for hard financial reasons. Not doing so risks creating safeguarding issues and costs to social services, and further down the line, strains on the welfare and health systems.

Lessons to learn from the ratios row

After months of vigorous campaigning, proposals to alter ratios of staff to children in childcare settings are finally – as Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg put it – “dead in the water”. For the children’s sector at large, it shows what can be achieved when organisations unite to act with one voice. It also shows the power of getting the parents’ lobby on board to strike fear into politicians (albeit of the Lib Dem persuasion).

For politicians – in this case childcare minister Elizabeth Truss – it shows the importance of basing policy on robust evidence. Perhaps “conviction politicians” will find it harder to push through ill-considered policies in an age where social media creates infinite avenues for well-argued protest.

ravi.chandiramani@markallengroup.com