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Carers

I should like to extend my thanks to the members of the Work and Pensions Committee for producing a thoughtful and good report. Like the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), I think that this is a good piece of work, and I am very proud to be part of the Committee that has produced it. Our Chairman has said that carers are the silent group, the group that nobody listens to. All of us feel that we have played a small part in giving voice to carers. They are people who work seven days a week, 24 hours a day caring for a relative, friend or next door neighbour. I wonder why such people are so silent and why we do not hear their voices very often. I think it is because a lot of our attention is concentrated on the recipients of the care. The Chairman said that he was a carer for a short time over Christmas when his wife broke her leg. I bet she got lots of cards saying, ““Get well soon”” and, ““I hope you will soon be up and about””. I am sure that she got the odd bunch of flowers—her husband is shaking his head—visitors, and lots of tea and sympathy because she had broken her leg. I also bet that the Chairman, her husband, did not get any of those things. I am fairly sure that he did not get a card saying, ““Good luck on your role as a carer”” or, ““I hope things work out well for you.”” I am also fairly sure that no one knocked on the door and said to him, ““You go and have a break, we'll look after your wife for you””—I know that they would not tell him to go down to the pub, because he is teetotal. The tea and sympathy and concern are generally for the person who needs care. I speak from personal experience. I have often been the recipient of care, mostly when I was younger, from my parents. I must say that I gave them a pretty hard life. When a person is going through a lot of pain and misery, and is finding life difficult, they take it out on the people who are closest to them—their nearest and dearest. They are the ones who are asked by, say, a child with a disability, ““Why can't I be normal?”” or ““Why can't you take my pain away?”” Parents get that kind of pressure, and they are also the carers. They have a double burden. They have the burden of caring and of doing the state's job—often, they do not want the state to be involved. Many people, particularly those who care for older people, do not want their relative to be in a residential or old folks' home; they want to keep them at home. At the same time, particularly if the person who is being cared for can be difficult or has behavioural problems as a result of their disability or illness, or due to mental illness, they often have the burden of being the butt of the anger of the person for whom they are trying to care. However, they do not walk away. They stay, day in day out, year in year out. That is why it is important for Committees such as the Work and Pensions Committee to take their plight seriously, and for the Government to do likewise. Without those carers, the whole care system would collapse. I think that carers save the Government £87 billion a year. I do not think that any of us are advocating that carers should relinquish their role. They assume their responsibilities, willingly in some cases and reluctantly in others, because they think that they can probably provide far better care than could ever be provided by a state system, no matter how good. Carers are the silent group, as the Chairman of the Committee said. I am following other speakers, and I am not sure what bits of our report to talk about—a lot has already been covered. However, individual stories often tell us more than anything else. The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) used his speech to highlight individual cases, and I will do the same. More than anything, individual cases illustrate what difficulties and problems can arise. The biggest single thing that the Government can get right for carers is respite. Perhaps we do not give enough attention to that. We are lucky in Aberdeen because we have a carers centre. Last year, when we were producing the report, I was amazed how many carers I met—I have been meeting a lot of carers in the past week in my constituency, and I will come to why they have been knocking on my door. The Committee met a lot of carers. We visited Harrogate, and I went to my carers centre to talk to people. They raised the issue of young carers, who are often forgotten. In some cases, people's whole young lives are affected by their caring role. Any aspirations and ability to go into further or higher education, for example, are curtailed because they care for their parents. We met some children in Harrogate whose homes were dysfunctional because a parent was a drug addict. Those individuals can lead enormously unsettled lives. I remember vividly one of the people who worked at the centre in Harrogate saying that parents who had mental health problems—they might be manic depressives—often caused the most difficulty. She said that a child could adapt remarkably well if their life was dreadful all the time; they simply learned that that was the norm and to cope. However, some mental health illnesses mean that the parent is up and down, and there are huge differences between manic and depressive phases. The children of those parents find life the most difficult. Things can be great if the parent is in a manic phase and there is lots of energy going around, but the children do not know how long the phase will last or when it will end and the whole family will tumble back into depression. That can be difficult to cope with. That is why respite for young carers was talked about when I visited the Aberdeen centre. As part of national carers week in December last year, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Doran) and I ran a carers surgery so that people could come to see us—he did it in the morning and I did it in the afternoon. The enormous range of carers who came in that day was interesting, from the man who had reluctantly allowed his wife, who suffered from Alzheimer's, to go into a care home, to the mother whose daughter was at a special school but reaching the transition period, who felt that there was nowhere to go. I should explain the situation in Aberdeen as it relates to the latter case. Aberdeen city council has a fairly major problem with its finances. Last year, it had a £50 million deficit. It took the decision that children who were at special schools could no longer stay on in school to age 19, a provision that had existed for some time. If people attended a special school, the school leaving age was effectively 19, and the six months before was used as preparation for transition. The decision was taken, presumably to save money, that those people would have to leave school at 18, like everyone else. It was taken arbitrarily, and with no proper discussion. The mother who came to see me thought her daughter had six months in which to prepare and get ready for adult life and move from children's to adult services, but was told that her place at school was going to be withdrawn, and there was nothing in its place. She was not alone. Other constituents have come to see me with exactly the same problem. I thought that I was being very successful as an MP, because I seemed to win every case I took up with the local council. It would back down, saying, ““They're not going to have to leave school at 18, they can continue.”” However, I found out only last week that it was not down to my success as an MP; the local council found that people had nowhere to go, and the preparation had not been done, so people had to go back to their school. Imagine the upset that that caused in the family. We are still in that position. Another constituent, Margaret Hodder, got in touch with me last week. Her daughter is 18, and she has autism and bipolar disorder. The daughter will be leaving school in the summer, but Margaret does not know what will happen to her, because the council is not providing the appropriate support. Part of the problem—this is why I have seen a lot of carers in the last week—is that, due to budget constraints on the council, decisions are being taken that affect the care and respite that parents will get. The council has two day centres—Rosehill and Burnside—to provide respite for a range of people. However, one of them is to close—I believe I heard two days ago that it is probably Burnside. Some 190 people go to the two day centres, but the council wants to cut it down to 100. It is going to get rid of some people. It said that over-65s did not qualify, so they will not go to the day centre, which is fine. It will get rid of others by reassessing people under new criteria. They will go because they will not be severely disabled enough. However, a large number of people will be left without the day centre. Today's Press and Journal, the paper for north-east Scotland, tells the story of a mother, Aileen Hutchison, whose 31-year-old daughter Susan has cerebral palsy. I must declare an interest; Aileen was in my class at school, so her story is all the more poignant. What she said sums up why we wrote the report. She went to a meeting to find out what was going to happen. At the moment, her daughter attends the Rosehill day centre five days a week and is thriving. Aileen says in the paper that the council"““admitted that the council's plans are to save money but tried to say that the plans will also improve the service users' lives. When it was pointed out to them that this decision does not only affect the service users but their families too, they didn't even respond.””" That goes back to what I said originally. We often think of the service users or the people needing care, but in the impact studies that must be done under the Disability Discrimination Act 2005, we forget to factor in carers' needs as well. The Committee Chairman said that carers were entitled to respite. The carers in Aberdeen do not think that they are entitled to respite; they are losing what respite they had. I have described the picture for those leaving school and looking for help, but carers and constituents have come to me from the other end. They are elderly parents whose children are perhaps in their 40s. Because people are living longer, people well into their 70s may end up caring for children in their 40s. One mother phoned me last summer, before the Rosehill closure was an issue. Her daughter goes to Rosehill. She had been told, again in an arbitrary way, that her 43-year-old daughter's day care was to be cut by one day. She was in tears on the phone, saying, ““How can I manage? I can only manage her over the weekend because five days a week she goes to her day care. What happens when she can only go four days a week?”” Such are the individual stories that illustrate why the Government have to get it right. We must also get it right in services for older people. There is a huge job of work to be done by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The way we behave towards older people with disabilities, particularly learning disabilities—I hope that this is happening only in Aberdeen—is nothing short of a diminution of their human rights. Another decision by the council in Aberdeen is to move everyone over 65 into older people's services. The result is that adults with learning disabilities who have turned 65 are now being reassessed. If they are in supported accommodation, they are being told that it is too expensive and that they will have to go to an old folks' home. The only reason they have to move is that they have turned 65 and they have learning disabilities. Their relatives have been knocking on my door in the past week. I was quite horrified. I honestly thought that I had got it wrong. I wrote to the chief executive of the council expecting an immediate rebuttal saying, ““No, we're not doing that. Of course we wouldn't dream of doing that.”” It has not come. Instead, the lead councillor on social work has accused me of scaremongering in the press, saying, ““Actually, we're just going to assess them, and then we'll decide from there where they're going to live.”” Those people are living in a home situation where relatives may be caring for them, and they are being told where they must live. It is appalling. I was horrified, and I have got increasingly angry as the week has gone on since I found that out. Those things are happening in Aberdeen, where we thought we were getting better. If it is happening now, the situation may be happening elsewhere, in other local authorities that are finding that their money is being cut. It is difficult to get to the bottom of where the money is coming from. Some of it comes from Westminster and some of it from the Department for Work and Pensions in the form of benefits to both the cared-for and the carers, but in other areas it may come from the local council. It is difficult and confusing. I hope that we can behave better in the 21st-century world. We are a rich country. We should be valuing our disabled people. A measure of how civilised we are is how we treat the most vulnerable, and part of the package of those most vulnerable people is their carers. How we treat the carers in our society should also be a measure of how civilised we are.