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The Guardian
25-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Magnificent, yet passed over, targeted, fined – family carers are the hidden face of the care crisis
The word 'care' sits in a strange place in UK politics, somehow combining an increasing sense of urgency with a maddening and very British vagueness. Most of us know that there is a worsening care crisis. The reasons, we are told, are to do with demographics – more old people, put bluntly – and the seemingly eternal lack of money, or governments willing to spend enough on the kind of care most politicians fixate on: the sort that revolves around either residential settings or home visits, done by the anonymous mass of people we call 'care workers'. This category of human being is now in the news as never before: a lot of them tend to come from abroad, something that Westminster has now decided is intolerable. What a mess this issue is, and how many other matters the debate about it omits – not least the care needs of hundreds of thousands of adults who are learning disabled. But by far the biggest gap in our understanding centres on about 7 million unpaid carers, whose lives are explored in a new book. Strangely, it has been written by a frontline British politician; stranger still, the best bits are among the most compelling, moving pieces of political prose I have read in a very long time. The author of Why I Care: And Why Care Matters is the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey. Its first third focuses on his own life story: his experience of looking after the mother he lost to cancer when he was still in his teens, and the life he and his wife, Emily – and their daughter, Ellie – share with his son, John, who was born with physical and intellectual disabilities. Like all parents, Davey experiences joy and worry, but at intense extremes. As the parent of a child with special educational needs, I recognise his deep fears about the future that awaits his son after his parents have gone: 'No one's going to love him, and hold him, like Emily and I do.' And just about everything he says is full of a mixture of frustration and bafflement I completely relate to, mostly focused on our systems of government and politics, and the archaic workings of what remains of the welfare state. Pretty much by definition, what Davey calls family carers lead pressured, often sleepless, overburdened lives. Large numbers of them have to cope with mental health problems. More than 1 million are reckoned to live in poverty. Attempts to calculate the monetary worth of what carers do, he says, have put the aggregate figure at about the same level as the UK's annual spend on the NHS. But how often do we hear about any of this? Family care was part of the pre-political lives of Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner; it was also there in David Cameron's story. But what it demands of policymakers still seems too awkward: in a political culture that rarely sees issues as much more than debates about budgets, the needs of people who look after their close relatives seem too complex and messy to really grapple with. There is, moreover, a problem with Westminster's prevailing conceptions about what makes life worthwhile: as politicians constantly describe the voters they worry about as 'working people' who make up 'hard-working families', it's pretty obvious who such thinking excludes. As a result, omissions and oversights pile up. The UK has no system of paid leave for family carers: one study Davey quotes suggests that 40% of people who provide high-level family care have had to give up work completely. Huge injustices are woven into the lives of young carers – who have to start seeing to the needs of siblings and parents at pitifully young ages – and how little the education system makes allowances for what they have to do at home. As I read Davey's book, Private Eye magazine gave this year's Paul Foot award for investigative journalism to my Guardian colleagues Josh Halliday and Patrick Butler, for their work on a mind-boggling scandal: the story of how hundreds of people who received carer's allowance (which is £83.30 a week) were prosecuted for unwittingly breaking cruel earnings rules. Everything came down to a key facet of the benefits system that remains in place: the fact that earning a penny over a weekly threshold of £151 – now raised to £196 – meant that the entirety of someone's carer's allowance was summarily withdrawn; and if the relevant systems didn't pick up any accidental exceeding of the earnings limit, 'overpayments' could fester on for months, until people whose lives were already loaded with pressures and stresses were suddenly hit with impossible demands for payback. The government has announced an overhaul aimed at spotting overpayments more quickly, but all this is surely the ultimate example of the institutionalised callousness displayed towards family carers: not just the miserly levels of benefits they receive, but the way the system seems to cast them as people prone to lie and cheat (witness one of many stark recent headlines: 'Mother of autistic boy left with £10,000 debt after breaching DWP rules by £1.92 a week'). The way officialdom treats any combination of work and care, moreover, is reflected in rules about education: if you study for less than 21 hours a week, you remain eligible for carer's allowance – but any more time spent on formal learning means you lose the benefit completely. And now there is another level of cruelty. The government's plans to cut down millions of people's entitlements to the personal independence payment will have knock-on effects for carers, depriving an estimated 150,000 people of either carer's allowance or the carer element of universal credit which means that many households will be hit twice over. Plainly, this is more proof of how devalued carers are. There may be one or two rays of light. Unpaid care was largely missing from most of the PR blurb that launched the government's independent inquiry into adult social care, but Louise Casey – the cross-bench peer leading its work – nonetheless made a point of beginning the process with conversations that involved family carers. But the surrounding political context remains grim: Westminster's musings about care still seem to myopically revolve around older people having to sell their houses to pay for places in homes, and whether a country that clearly needs as many care workers as possible should make recruiting them even more difficult. Towards the end of his book, Davey asks a handful of questions about very different subjects. 'What would happen if we totted up unpaid carer hours and paid them the minimum wage?' he wonders. 'What would happen if we looked at families whose real crisis is poor and unaffordable housing and fixed that first? What would happen if we took the concept of a good childhood – with a right to play, a right to education, a right to be carefree – and applied it to the thousands of child carers we know exist?' I have a couple more. As our society rapidly ages, what will happen when the majority of us start to experience life as family carers, and have to confront the fact that our responsibilities to some of our loved ones can no longer be entirely palmed off on other people? And what will that mean for an established model of politics and economics that holds that, unless we are in paid employment, we can be ignored? These will be two of the central questions of the next 10 years, and when they finally hit us, they will change everything. Davey, to his credit, seems to know that. Why do so many other politicians avert their eyes? John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Telegraph
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Britain's care system is collapsing – but Ed Davey has a plan
Bookshops receive their fair share of polemics from politicians seeking to enhance their own status, usually in the run-up to an election. Worthy (and often dull) subjects are tackled by this or that serving or aspiring party leader, in a bid to convince voters, even those who only spot the books from afar, that they're serious people with a serious agenda. Such is the cynicism of the age. Why I Care by Ed Davey is not in that category. On first glance, the title might put off the curious reader; it reeks of Lib Dem virtue-signalling, proclaiming the moral superiority of a party from whom we're well used to hearing lectures about how to be better people. But even in the first few pages, it becomes clear that the title has a literal meaning that transforms this book into a sincere, pragmatic and powerful analysis of one of the most urgent dilemmas facing our country today. For Davey himself is a carer, has been for most of his life and will be for the rest of it. He lost his father when he was four years old and his mum, from cancer, when he was 15. He spent years as a teenager helping to care for her, aided by his two older brothers. His own son, John, has a neurological condition that has left him with severe learning and physical disabilities and the need for round-the-clock, lifelong care. And Davey's wife, Emily, has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It is in this context that Davey attempts to tackle the realities and challenges – but also the joys and satisfaction – that come with the responsibilities of caring for a loved one. Why I Care is not an easy read; it is frequently uncomfortable, because it is so honest about the circumstances experienced by so many carers of all ages. Yet Davey's optimism and his pure love for his family, his obviously sincere concern for the plight of others in the same situation, shines from his writing. This is, in part, an autobiography, and as with all political narratives, it relates the author's political career from non-committed student to full-time employee of the Liberal Democrats in Westminster and thence to a parliamentary seat himself. Political nerds might have preferred a more detailed – and indeed, a more strictly chronological – account of what, by any measure, has been an extraordinary political career. Having entered the Commons in 1997, Davey rose to the Cabinet in 2012, in David Cameron and Nick Clegg's coalition government, serving as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change – a historically unusual achievement for a Lib Dem politician in itself. He lost his seat at the 2015 general election – the first serving cabinet minister to do so since Michael Portillo in 1997 – but regained it two years later, and then, after Jo Swinson's catastrophic defeat at the 2019 general election, became leader of his party. That this rollercoaster ride was experienced even as Davey and his wife coped with their own domestic challenges says much about the man. And it becomes clear that writing about himself and his own career was never his priority for this book: his chief concern is helping the reader understand not just his own plight, but the challenges facing the millions of unpaid carers in the UK. His authority comes partly as a result of his own experience and partly because of his work as MP for Kingston and Surbiton, in which he deals with constituents negotiating the maze put in carers' paths by local and national government. There are more than six million unpaid carers in the UK, a million of whom work more than 50 hours a week. As Davey points out, the continued operation of the NHS depends on the willingness of this army of volunteers to keep doing that work. Were they to down tools for any reason, the system would be unable to function. And yet, despite how essential these workers are, the recognition, support and rewards are, at best, inconsistent. Davey eschews the temptation simply to berate successive governments for their failings, and tentatively explores policy solutions instead. Even so, those who expect a detailed template for a future system of support for carers will be disappointed. According to Davey, it is our politicians' tendency to opt for solutions first, and only subsequently to seek cross-party consensus on broad principles, that has led so often to failure. For instance, the current Government's decision to set up a further three-year review of care under Dame Louise Casey is a source of frustration to him: Davey believes that previous reviews, not least the review led by Andrew Dilnot and commissioned by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, have already covered much of the same ground. Davey recommends what to most would seem a straightforward and common-sense innovation: allocating a named carer and social-worker to families, much as most people have a named GP. As you might expect from a Liberal Democrat, Davey is more sympathetic to a 'ground up' approach than a centralised one. 'The Casey Commission should look at this, rather than wasting time pondering a centralised, remote and bureaucratic system. I'm totally convinced good community models would enhance the efficiency of a named care worker approach.' In explaining his motive for writing Why I Care, Davey writes: 'I hope I can promote a debate about how parents or unpaid family carers can be reassured that some alliance between family, community and state will ensure their loved ones will always get the care they need. And that the care will be safe and kind.' It is that last word that stands out. It is not a word you might expect to read in most books about policy but it permeates this one: Davey has spent his entire life being kind to those he loves and those he represents. He is not a man who dines out on his own moral superiority; he just gets on with it and hopes that the Government can too.
