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Carers

I am grateful for that clarification. I shall move on to respite care, because we know that caring for someone can be hard. Six out of 10 carers say that the biggest thing that we can do to help them is to give them a break. That message was repeated by the carers whom I met at Centre 404 in Islington yesterday. Since we introduced the carers grant in 1999, more than £1 billion has been provided to councils to do just that. The grant is worth £240 million this year and will increase to £256 million next year. It includes £25 million a year for councils to respond immediately to carers who are in a crisis and can no longer care for their loved one. Encouraging the national health service to recognise that support for carers is as much an issue for it as it is for local councils and social care, so we have allocated an additional £150 million to primary care trusts between 2009 and 2011 to work with their local authority partners to provide personalised breaks for carers.