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Carers

I will be brief, because I recognise that other people want to contribute to the debate. I welcome the debate and the remarks made by the hon. Member for South-West Surrey (Mr. Hunt). It is always the case that bureaucracy needs to be simplified. However, to make that an end in itself is limiting. It is also true to say that the issue is partly about the nature of the society in which we live, the kind of society we want and the importance of supporting people so that they can look after their families in their own homes, which is obviously right. People will always look after their families, relatives and neighbours in quite remarkable circumstances. For generations, people—an awful lot of them women—have looked after their family members at great sacrifice to themselves. Part of the challenge faced by the Government is how to make sure that people are able to act as carers with dignity and support and without running themselves ragged in the process. The Government have done a great deal in this respect and two areas have not been highlighted enough. First, there is the carers supplement to pension credit. That is enormously important because it deals with the anomaly that the hon. Member for Romsey (Sandra Gidley) pointed out in relation to people who, post-retirement, are suddenly deemed not to be carers anymore and with the difficultly implicit in the carers benefit system, which is that carers are recompensed for lost wages. The carers supplement to pension credit has been under-recognised. I also suspect that the pressure in relation to pension credit and means-testing has discouraged retired people who are carers from recognising that this important element of support exists. Secondly, there is the provision in the Pensions Bill for carers credits and for widening the scheme so that it is not linked just to certain restricted benefits. That will enable quite a number of people in my constituency, where there is a high level of participation in work, to feel a bit more confident about giving up full-time employment to take on caring responsibilities, without fearing that that will leave them without a pension in retirement. Those two points are important and are perhaps not sufficiently recognised. I want to comment on two areas of caring. Last Friday, in preparation for carers week, I spent time with some carers. Two of them were caring for spouses who were in ill health and a number of issues were raised about what happens when people’s health fluctuates and the carer finds themselves falling in and out of recognised care. The other group of people who seem to have had little recognition and who do heroic work are grandparents who take on the care of their grandchildren. I spent some time with Tanya Kettleborough. She and her husband took on two granddaughters after the girls’ mother horrendously abused and then abandoned them. Those two girls had the emotional difficulties of being abused and abandoned, and one of the girls was also left with profound physical disabilities because of the level and nature of the abuse. To an extent, the hon. Member for South-West Surrey was right: there is an issue about how much money carers get. In order to give her grandchildren a secure home, the grandmother had got a residence order, so she had forgone the opportunity of getting foster care payments, which would have given her an income of about £600 a week given the scale of the disabilities of one of the children. Instead, she got payments of about £370 for two weeks. She thus gave up about half her possible income, yet she said that she would do that again because it was what she wanted to do for her grandchildren. The care that she gives is astonishing. I had met the little girl before and I am sure that she has made much more progress in a couple of years with her grandmother than she would have done in residential care, which would have been the alternative option. While the grandmother said that this was not about the money and that she would do the same thing again, then came the buts. She wanted a new buggy for Shannon, the little child, because the child had outgrown her existing buggy and all the thrashing about had weakened it, meaning that it was no longer safe. In addition, the buggy did not have proper straps for the little girl, so the grandmother had to get some on eBay. As we all know, there are long waits for wheelchairs and buggies for disabled children. I think that the lack of buggy was down to one of the health providers. Padded walls were needed for the bedroom because the little girl would bang her head on the wall. Someone first said that they would pad all the wall and then that they would pad just around the bed. While that would be just about manageable, it had not been done. There was also no chair for the little girl, so she had to sit in her buggy indoors. While a chair had been loaned by social services, it was inappropriate and not big enough. A ramp was also needed to get the child out of the house in the buggy. That was down to the housing authority, although an occupational therapist was required to carry out an assessment and procure the ramp. The grandmother’s real problems were not money, her age—she was in her early-50s and had to give up work completely, although she had worked for her entire adult life, which obviously damaged her pension rights—her job security, or the fact that she was up all night with a little girl who could not sleep, but that she could not get the things that she needed, that there were waiting lists and that she did not know when the occupational therapist would come.