The only way policy would change is if you don’t care for your loved ones, and the government knows this.
New Zealand parliament passed a new law, paying a main carer £12 an hour pay if they care for a relative with a mental health issue or disability.
New Zealand are leading the way as millions of people across the UK are 24 hour carers for their family members getting an insulting £66.15 a week.
If caring for a loved one stopped overnight putting replacement services in place would cost the local councils and the government tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The care system would collapse overnight and the government would have to react and take action by paying the carer a full-time wage.
Sadly the only way this could ever happen is if people actually stop caring for their love ones and the government is counting on the fact that because they are loved ones people will not stop caring for them.
Being disabled myself I need assistance with washing, dressing, medical appointments and on occasion toileting. My wife does all the household tasks all the cleaning, laundry, hoovering, shopping, and maintaining the garden as I am unable to do this myself. However if my wife was to leave me a carer would be needed for two or three calls a day costing the local council thousands of pounds a year if not tens of thousands of pounds a year. Instead of this money being paid at the council it could be paid to my wife to be my full-time carer solving the issue of having the council to employ carers and improving my quality of life by having the person I love being my main carer.
There are many families around the UK including my friend Dan White and his wife Aimee who have a wonderful daughter called Emily who was born with spina bifida along with a number of other complicated medical needs and she requires full-time care. They care for their daughter all day every day and get very little funding from the government. However, if they stop caring for Emily she would need full-time residential care costing tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of pounds each year to provide the specialised medical equipment and carers required to support her needs.
However as we know parents like Dan and Amy will never put their child at risk or put them into the council system to receive this support as they love her too much and, like many other families, are being punished because of their good nature
Dan said ‘The time we put in is the equivalent of getting 30p and hour from the government, it’s a disgrace’.
The downside is if they did put Emily into care and everyone else did the same the government may actually take action on paying primary care as a full-time living wage just like they have done in New Zealand.
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