Wow. Kick a fella when he’s down, why don’t you? 

I always seem to be starting these posts with an apology for absence these days. I’m not going to do that here. It’s been an extraordinary roller coaster here since September last year. We were in hospital with N for 5 months and nearly lost her to RSV and pneumonia. So, as you can imagine I’ve been struggling with feeling down. 

However today I’m feeling cross, which is a better motivating frame of mind to write in. Why cross? I’m glad you asked. It seems like just yesterday we were ‘Clapping for Carers’ (200 weeks ago apparently). It felt like a big thing at the time, y’know global pandemic and all that.  

But this week, apparently, according to Rishi Sunak, we’re all crooks and we’re costing the UK 66 billion Pounds. You can see how as one of the UK’s 10.6 million unpaid carers (stats from Carer’s UK, State of Caring, 2022) who are saving the UK about £162 Bn every year. Yeah, you read that right. We’re saving the UK economy £162 Bn per year. To give that a little context, in 2022/3 the entire NHS commissioning budget was £153 Bn. (NHS England, 2023) Is it ok for me to feel a little underappreciated now?  

Rishi Sunak talked this week about sorting out Carers Allowance and Personal Independence Payment. Trust me when I say he’s not looking to make it fairer, more generous or easier to access. Currently Carers Allowance is a princely sum of £81.90 a week and I bet, like me, most Carers in 2024 are spending that on fuel. Caring involves ferrying people about, collecting prescriptions, going to appointments and in our case schools and hospices too. I try to bring in as much as I can to add to this sum to make life a little easier to live (a quarter of UK carers say they’re cutting back on essentials, i.e. food and heating, to make ends meet. Carers UK, State of Caring, 2022) but in the UK if you earn over £151 in a week, you get your Carers Allowance cut off. I reckon I’m not alone in worrying about this. 156,000 carers right now are being pursued by the DWP for any breaches and taken to court to pay tens of thousands in fines and back pay. (Remember the people who are already cutting back on food and heating? Yeah, them.)  The Guardian have been covering this, this week, god love them and it’s been a tiny light in a pretty dark 2020’s. In the Guardian article the DWP say “…it is right that we recover tax-payers money…”. That would seem fairer if they were as quick to recover the £10 Bn wasted on PPE (well, not totally wasted, there were yachts) as opposed to the £150 million a year they’re trying to get back from the poorest, most overworked section of this society.  

The rumours are that the government are looking to call an election before buggering off on their Summer hols. It can’t come soon enough.