Carer’s allowance turns 50 this year, but the milestone says little about the scale or value of the work done by the millions of people who care for relatives at home. Behind closed doors, they cook, clean, nurse and support sick, disabled and older family members, often with little public acknowledgment and very limited financial help.
The comparison with other emergencies makes the point sharply. If a house were on fire, nobody would expect the person calling 999 to put it out alone. If a child’s teacher were absent, few would think it reasonable for a parent to be told to step in and teach the class. Yet in social care, that logic has become normal: families are expected to absorb the burden when services are stretched.
That expectation now falls on almost 6 million unpaid carers in the UK. They are the people filling the gaps left by an increasingly strained care system, taking on responsibility that would otherwise be handled by trained, paid professionals.
The normalisation of unpaid care has grown alongside other signs of strain across public services. It sits in the background of headlines about DIY dentistry, long NHS waiting lists and people crowdfunding for treatment. Those examples are widely seen as symptoms of failure, but family care is often treated as something different, even though it reflects the same underlying problem: essential support being pushed onto individuals and households.
The result is a shadow workforce that is central to keeping the country going, while remaining largely invisible. Their labour is routine, exhausting and essential, but it is often described in sentimental terms rather than recognised as work in its own right.
Carer’s allowance was introduced half a century ago, yet the existence of a benefit does not mean the labour is properly valued. The fact that millions of people are still expected to shoulder such responsibility privately raises a wider question about what kind of social care system Britain has come to accept.
Who, then, cares for the carers? The answer, increasingly, is that families are left to care for one another while the state steps back. That arrangement may have become familiar, but familiarity does not make it fair.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist and the author of Who Wants Normal? Life Lessons from Disabled Women.
