From a quick look at caring and the rules, You also need to minus carers as they could be overlapping unemployed or retired or others and would definitely push up the count with repeated numbers. Also carers could be classified as working for the NHS because it saves the NHS.
Correct me if I am wrong about carers allowance. As I have zero knowledge of the working between carers and other benefits.
However, they provide service that the NHS or council should be providing. I think it should not be counted.
Now with the above information the numbers would look even lower.
Others what does that mean?
We now established it is not as bad as they say. It seems it is a blame game rather than taking responsibility for MPs running of the country.
A lot of carers don't get carers allowance either because they don't "qualify" (the criteria is strict and designed to say no), they don't realise they can, or they are secondary carers - you can only claim carers allowance for one person even if the person being cared for needs 24/7 265 day care.
It's worth noting that once you start actually counting carers as doing "work" you start having to worry about paying them for that "work" and all the other legal implications, such as maximum safe working hours (many are doing it 24/7), pay rates (at best it's currently at about £2 an hour), and holiday etc leave.
A single carer currently usually saves the government somewhere between 800-1600 a week if their efforts were to be done by paid third parties at commercial rates, the government relies on the fact that the carer is usually a family member who will do it mainly for love and will do it regardless of the effect it has on their own health/personal life (which can have the effect the carer then becomes ill/needs more help later in life due to the effects and stresses).
What gets me about carers allowance is that you can’t get it if you earn over £139 a week.
Yup
And IIRC it only counts overnight hours that you are actively giving care.
So it doesn't matter that you need to be available and within range to give care all night, and might get called 3 or 4 times for 15 minutes a time, meaning your sleep is extremely disturbed, it only IIRC counts that time that you are actively assisting, it also ignores the fact you can't do anything else in that time or that it ruins you for the next day and gets worse the longer it goes on.
I've said before when my mother was ill with Alzheimer's it took 3 of us to care for her*, as she needed someone available 24/7 and for most of the last 12 months that she was at home that meant someone in the same room, or at night awake in the next room listening out for her as she tried to get up without her sticks (instant fall, massive risk of a broken hip/head injury).
It utterly ruined my father's health, and did a number on my own and my brother, we've still basically got certain sounds that trigger an immediate response 7 years later because of the alarms etc we used to help monitor if she started to get out of bed at night, or was pressing a button to call for help** (before she got too bad to remember that).
*We barely managed it on a semi staggered shift system, but there were times when all 3 of us would be up at 2am trying to deal with her/clean up.
**Before we knew what it was, and when she was "only" suffering from "delirium from a water infection" we gave her a little hand bell. Neither my brother or I can relax playing certain games now because it turns out that bell is very close to a stock sound effect in RPG's and we're basically conditioned to respond to it.
ibb.co
commonslibrary.parliament.uk
amp.theguardian.com
