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Carers

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I am happy to praise the Motor Neurone Disease Association because he said earlier that if I did so he would buy me a pint in the bar later. In fact, I am genuinely happy to praise its work, because carers for people with motor neurone disease demonstrate one of the critical factors about carers, which is that their caring role often lasts for 24 hours, creating enormous stress and pressure. That is why it is incredibly important to do everything to support that role. Before I talk about the things that are going wrong, it is also important to talk about the things that have gone right. There have been a lot of changes over the past 15 years that have helped the role of carers. The Carers (Recognition and Services) Act 1995 set up carers’ assessments. In 1999, we had the first ever national carers strategy. The Carers and Disabled Children Act 2000 extended the right of direct payments to families with disabled children. The Carers (Equal Opportunities) Act 2004 gave local councils an obligation to promote carers’ assessments to those entitled to them. Last year, as I am sure that the Minister will tell us, we had the Work and Families Act 2006, which extended the right of flexible working to carers. We have had some modest improvements in respite care. The Pensions Bill, which is before Parliament at the moment, will strengthen the rights of carers in terms of entitlement to state pensions. However, eight years on from the national carers strategy we are still in a situation whereby three quarters of carers say that they are worse off as a result of their caring role, 79 per cent. of carers say that their health has been affected by their caring role, and one in five carers say that they have had to reduce the amount of food they buy because of the financial pressures created by their caring. I am afraid that the Government’s response has been disappointing. They have promised yet another review—a review of the strategy involving, we are promised, the widest ever consultation with carers. In the end, however, this is the politics of ““talk, talk””. The danger of that is not only that it does nothing in itself but that it obscures the fundamental problem—the Government’s thinking that the only solution to these problems is financial, which means that carers are made to wait in a queue alongside everyone else who is calling on public resources and get restricted to the occasional scraps. We need a much more radical and imaginative approach. In particular, we need to slay the myth that the only way to improve the lives of the UK’s 6 million carers is to increase spending on the system, when often it is the system itself that is failing.