To wonder if Carers will ever be paid more?

[croppedhimout]

I get less than £70 a week carers allowance for 19/20 hours worth of care every day. It's disgusting

AIBU to wonder if we will ever be paid more? I'd say no because...

1. Nobody seems outraged at how little carers are paid, not in the media anyway, where it counts

1. Carers for the most part can't strike.

It's an uneven benefit Thom. No help with dental costs, no help with prescriptions etc.

Ds has to have 3:1 support when looked after by other people so I get £70 ( and only that) for doing the work of 3 people.

And it's taxable which means it's counted as income for other benefits (e.g., Tax Credits).

Why is there an earning restriction at all for carers? It makes no sense.

People think it's a benefit?!

Agree.

Well you obviously don’t have the same financial problems that many carers have 🙄Consider yourself very lucky! It only takes a split of a second for your life to be turned upside down!

Because the government thinks if you're working more than 14-15 hrs a week (the most you could do at NMW without going over the threshold) then you can't also provide 35hrs care.

There are many people out there working and caring, it's unfair that they can't access CA which could perhaps allow them to buy in some support for the person they care for (e.g., meals delivery service) or could allow them to drop some hours to better address a care-work-life balance.

I think the ideal would be to have different levels of carers allowance for different levels of care being given. I also personally think there should be more than 3 levels of DLA and more than 2 levels of PIP as some levels of disability are just so high. In reality that's never going to happen as it would just be way too complex to administer. When someone claims CA, no one ever checks up what caring they do. Someone could be popping into an elderly relative a few times a week and checking up on them by phone or being 'on call' in case of problems, yet they get exactly the same as someone constantly supervising a confused, potentially aggressive person with dementia who is up half the night. There is no comparison.

Will it though? The amount received MAY go up if we’re lucky, but I spent a while googling about a week ago and couldn’t find anything about the earnings threshold going up. I have a 2 day a week job (5 hours per day, term time only), they want me to do a third day but I’d actually be worse off every month in doing that, as the extra day would equate to less than I receive in CA, which I’d lose.

It goes up most years although I don't remember the last increase being a lot. I think it went from £128 a week to £132 that it currently is. I guess it may go up significantly more this year with the increase in NMW.

OP nobody cares about us at all. I think last time I actually bothered to calculate it - worked out less than 40p an hour.

Previous career I had a very decent salary, real prospects , company car/benefits etc.No choice but to drop everything and cope because let's face it there's no alternative.

And whilst idiots like @Sazzling too vile a comment to respond to exist I've no faith it's ever going to change.

And no our household gets no other benefits aside from our DC DLA.

Utterly soul destroying

Ah it will go up, but not in line with the NLW.

www.carehomeprofessional.com/carers-allowance-claimants-forced-to-reduce-working-hours-again/

I have just found the figure for 2023/24. The earnings threshold is going up to £139 a week so not a huge increase. Carers allowance is going up to £76.75 and UC carers element to £185.86 ( monthly).

So they can limit who gets it. Otherwise what's to stop anyone taping their disabled relative for their details to register as their carer without doing the work? Shit money and a price cap means you're only going to claim it if you have to😔

In my experience very few people ‘dump’ relatives with us. They need specialised and 24 hour care. Not everyone is able to provide it at home.

I imagine it’s because ~1 million people in the U.K. receive carer’s allowance and it would be simply unaffordable to make it something like 25,000 a year.

@2023newyearnewname late FIL was a big man, 6ft odd tho not heavy set. MIL is 5ft. How well do you think she could care for him when he needed help getting out of bed, to the toilet, washing etc? We had a young child with complex medical issues so it wasn't like DH could just give up work and move back to his parents to care for him. I'd have been left a single none working parent to a disabled and pooy child. Or perhaps MIL could have moved in with me and we'd have partner swapped for a few years?

He wasn't dumped anywhere. She fought to get him appropriate care for his wellbeing and inadvertently her own and ours. It would have benefited no one to have kept him home.

Like most people, MIL made a hard decision for the person she loved, to make sure they got what they deserved.

I'm not sure that the government or the general population realise what life is actually like for some unpaid family carers, or perhaps they do realise to some degree but do not think about, care about or value us.

I gave up my career to care for my severely disabled DC. For the 19 years since, I have provided 24/7 care. The alternative would be full-time residential care at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. My Carer's Allowance works out at 41p an hour this year, (or £69.70 pw/£3624.40pa).

I love my DC very much and care because of that love and because of my feeling of responsibility for my DC as a parent. But no one should underestimate the toll this takes on health, both physical and mental.

Being valued at 41p an hour can contribute to a feeling of worthlessness.

Or they could choose to not do it and the tax payer pick up the huge bill....

I think that carers should plan a mass strike and renounce caring duties for one day. We should notify all councils that we are collectively going on strike and for that day they have to provide full time PA’s or be neglectful, Also tell carers allowance people to dock a pathetic one day allowance.

Carers allowance is going up to £76.75
55p per hour then next year, instead of 41p.

Best not spend that extra 14p all at once.

They are clueless.

It must be nice to live in such ignorance.

Only in some LAs. Some LAs don’t allow you to employ family members.

We don’t get any other benefits other than my carer’s allowance and DC’s DLA.

Please can all of you in this position consider whether Direct Payments can be used to pay for at least some of the care you provide?

It's up to each LA to agree if they will pay a family member but in our case after initial resistance they backed down as it's so hard to recruit carers. They accepted that paying me was a better option than me saying they had to find and organise the carers that DD needs 24/7.

Going through the assessment process is the toughest thing I've ever done, we had 12 months of stress with the LA that crushed me but at least now we have a plan that pays for some external carers and when I do the care I am paid. After 18 years of nothin but CA for me (DH salary was just enough that i got nothing else) it is a huge relief.

The system is absurd but it's worth pursuing if your circumstances fit the Direct Payments model.