Carers Allowance WTF

The person cared for has to have AA for the carer to claim CA already. AA is not for carers it's for additional expenses attending appointments etc.

I worked for a short time in DWP for my sins

Can your mum claim attendance allowance and perhaps cover some of your expenses of caring for her that way, as well as your carer's allowance?

Family/friends carers are incredibly undervalued. In countries where family do care for their family often have a breadwinner system where the carer works part time or not at all, they usually have a family system that supports the carers too. In the UK it doesn't work that way. Over the past decade I've worked two full time jobs for much of that time and provided care for several people with really challenging issues. No one helps.

A couple of years ago I had been trying to get SS involved because the issues had progressed way beyond my capabilities. The police had been called for one and they contacted SS who then decided to call me to tell me I needed to do more. I firmly declined to do one thing more, told them they'd left me trying to cope with issues I don't understand leading to challenging behaviour I cannot reasonably deal with I felt ashamed but I had to refuse to help them to get any help for them although having other people visiting them causes just as many issues and the carers are on the phone daily asking for more things. Even when they went into a care home, it still came with additional work, it was never ending slices of daily shit on toast.

I was recently blocked in a shop door way by a chugger for one of the charities I'd asked for help (and told nothing in my area). I don't often feel sorry for chuggers but I did manage to give them a good piece of my mind very loudly before they moved ot of my way.

On top of that I still need to live, run a house, and as the only income earner (no partner) it's quite a challenge because caring for people comes with a cost. The stupidly low income you are allowed plus carers doesn't cut it, I can't claim benefits because I earn too much, relying on UC who then cut the benefit because CA is classed as income, it's not enough to live on. CA has never been any different it always had an effect on other benefits.

So that the old line of oh in other countries it's a privilidge to care for your family, yes it is, but you have to have a family to support you all in order to provide care and especially for challenging issues. If you don't have that support for income, emotionally, physically it's a horrendous slog you constantly feel guilty about begrudging. All for £81 a week only some can claim.

The carers allowance isn’t means tested against household income, if you are low income you would be eligible for uc as well

i currently work 20h and care about 70-90h for 2 people with high care needs. It just means people like me never get a break. The government absolutely doesn't give a shit about carers.

Don't forget pension contributions can be used to keep your earnings down- it might well work out for you (i am in similar boat and have done this for yearS)

I get carer's allowance and I didn't even ask for it because I didn't know it existed. A nice lady from some gouvernment acency called me up due to a demand to change SEN provision for my son. She asked if I worked and I laughed. I would have been fired if I had a job with ds being in and out of school needing assistance with everything except physical stuff due to his autism. He was 13 at the time and the lady told me I should get carer"s allowance so that was nice. A shame I didn't know that many years ago😄 but since DH has a decent salary and we're quite frugal I never thought of this.

Something else I don't get is that only one person can claim carers allowance for a person.
My son requires 24 hour care and will do for the rest of his life.
That's 168 hours a week.
But they will only pay carers allowance for one person to look after him for 35 hours a week.
A big difference.
Obviously I don't expect someone to be paid for the whole 168 hours a week but I would have expected more than 35 hours.
My husband can't get a part time job to top up his carers allowance because he has to be available to look after our son all the time.

If you had a ltd company and paid yourself the limit for your hours then would that work?

Sorry haven't read all the replies so apologies if this has been mentioned.
Depending on where you live you may be able to claim direct payments from social services for your mum.
She would have to qualify via their needs assessment and be under the financial threshold.
If she qualified she would recieve the direct payments and then pay you as her carer for however many hours she needs (acording to her assessment)
Worth having a look at your local authority website.
Also if your mum is above the financial threshold in savings maybe have a chat to her about paying you for your care, but be careful here that she has capacity to fully understand it all.

Don't forget to add, any money you receive will be deducted out of your universal credit. At the full amount not 0.55 per £1 like a job 😬

My son applied for carers for me. It should have been straightforward as I’m already on PIP.

It took 18 MONTHS for them to pay him! And that was after numerous phone calls. In the end we got our MP involved. It was one year after he stopped being eligible as he got a job which took him over the earnings limit. So at the time we really needed the extra income, he got NOTHING!

It’s to stop people abusing the system (like they have been doing for years). You can’t work full time & care for someone, it’s not feasible but time & time people have tried it on. I’m not saying you are at all but it’s families like you who are now struggling to navigate a system because of the dishonesty of others.

I don’t know much about it but sounds like a shit show of a system that lacks fundamental understanding of how caring actually works. I expect they are capping the number of hours you can work/the earning threshold because they think it can’t be possible to be caring for someone 35 hours a week and working more than 16 hours. Yes you are right, it will be a lot more than 35 hours for some people. Don’t they think people need care at weekends and through the night? I mean jeez there are 168 hours in a week. There needs to either be recognition, and appropriate payment, for all those hours or recognition that many people will also need to do some work, and and set the caps a bit higher.

"In the past" a large number of people (women) didn't work and there wasn't the same necessity for 2 incomes to keep a roof over your head that often applies now, read the threads on here about families struggling with 2 wage earners. Families were less geographically fractured and there were more hands to share the care being given.

I gave up a well paid job 5 years ago to care for my husband who has now been completely bedbound for over 2 years.My health has taken an enormous hit, as has my private pension potential as I'm of the generation working until 67. Please explain to me why anyone would be in this position for around £80 a week if there was any viable alternative that didn't involve putting the cared for person into a nursing home?

No, women looked after their parents (and often in laws) when they became elderly. Usually because they either didn’t work or had retired in their 50s/early 60s, had their own children in their early 20s so they would have long flown the nest and the endless expectation of care would then move to the elderly. Thankfully opportunities for women have changed so this isn’t the average life expectations anymore. It’s not just about the elderly either, life can change in an instant. I certainly didn’t foresee having a child who will need care for life, a woman I know didn’t expect her husband to lose all physical function in his 50s. I didn’t expect my own parent to develop Alzheimer’s in their 40s. Care giving isn’t just ‘well you should suck up taking care of your elderly parents’, what we should be looking at is why there isn’t any social care available at all.

I want DH to claim Carers Allowance, but he has the being paid in lump sums every three to four months issue. We don't get UC, savings were too high until recently, and when I'm made redundant later this year the redundancy payment will make them too high again.

We get DLA for DS, which is 4,800 a year. That's it. I earn about 19,000/yr take home which has to cover all bills and household costs, DH about 4-5,000 though he's going to have to cut down on work as it's not sustainable, he needs to keep the car running and have enough to cover his personal costs.

If we could both work full time just on minimum wage we'd be significantly better off.

Just to correct you....

You can claim both Carers Allowance and the Carer Element of UC.

If I was working outside of the home and earning 81.30 a week it would not affect my UC, or would at least be deducted on a sliding scale - but Carers Allowance is deducted pound for pound from UC as "unearned income".

They also subtract most of the carers allowance off of the UC allowance.

We’ve struggled horribly since my DH got cancer.

@overthebow Attendance allowance is not necessarily to pay for care. Attendance Allowance is one of the eligibility benefits to be able to claim Carers Allowance.

I think its because if someone is requiring a huge amount of care they probably are also entitled to quite a lot of disability benefits and universal credit so the household overall would be receiving quite a lot of financial support.

Where it gets difficult is when adult children are caring for elderly relatives they don't live with, as those adult children can end up not able to work much due to the caring responsibilities but not seeing those disability /pip/uc benefits in their own household. Carers allowance works better for those living in the same household as the person they are caring for.

People these days may have moved away from their families, are likely to have had children later so may still have school aged children at home, or may just not be able to afford to give up work to provide full time care if it's needed. Smaller families as well.

As for expecting to be paid for caring - people need to eat, keep a roof over their heads, pay the bills. And it's a lot cheaper for the state to give a pathetic amount of benefits to support carers than the alternatives.

This is the problem with all/most benefits- those who play the system and those who don’t get enough for what they do. Genuinely don’t know what the answer is.

I looked into this when my mum had dementia, but never pursued it because I have another income and it seemed too fiddly to calculate. However, I have a friend whose father is disabled and lives at home. His wife gets the council budget for his 4 visits a day paid to her to manage. She employs my friend to do two visits a day and the other daughter to do the other two visits as his ‘carers’ even though she and one of the daughters lives in the same house as him. Both daughters earn £200 a week for this, despite doing no personal care. I’ve always wondered how this is allowed

In the past caring for your parents in their old age was the quid pro quo for them looking after you when you were young. Now people expect to be paid for it. Presumably you can't be paid for a full time job and a full time caring because many people fall into that catagory of looking after family around work.