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Carers

My hon. Friend makes an important point. If he had attended the debate earlier this year about the life chances of disabled children, he would have heard in my speech that for families with disabled children, the number of questions that have to be answered is not 769, but 1,118. The situation is actually worse for those parents. What is most worrying about this complexity in the benefit system is how it makes it difficult for carers to work. All these benefits have different rules about the work that can or cannot be done. On carer’s allowance, it is possible to earn £87 a week, but any more and the benefit is lost. For income support, anything above £20 is deducted pound for pound. With housing benefit, anything more than £20 is deducted at a rate of 65 per cent., while with council tax benefit it is deducted at the rate of 20 per cent. More than half of carers give up work because of their role, but nearly half would like to work if they could, so why are we penalising them? This is not simply a moral question; it is also, because of the demographic crisis on our doorstep, a practical question. I was trying to think of a way to personalise this issue for the select group of hon. Members in their places this evening. The average age of an MP is actually 50. By the time the average MP becomes 75, there will be an additional 3.2 million 75-year-olds compared with the number of them today. In that period, because of the ageing population, there will be 500,000 fewer children; yet there will be 500,000 more disabled children and all of them will need carers. Six out of 10 men and seven out of 10 women will become carers at some point in their lifetime, but this involves children as well. There are also 175,000 child carers, and that number is growing. The choice is simple. Do we want family and friends to remain the mainstay of the caring that takes place in our society, or do we want to gamble by doing nothing to reform the bureaucracy of the social care system and the complexity of the benefits system? Do we want to risk those carers giving up and passing that responsibility on to the state, which would be the worst possible outcome for cared-for people?