why are home carers so under valued. carers allowance moan.

[Psycho Sonny]

My mum has to cook my meals, clean my room, wash my clothes, supervise me while showering, arrange my meds and more, all while holding down a full time job. Her job only pays £19k a year, but she still can’t get any carers top up for looking after me.

Your lucky your mobile and your brain works fully as does your eyesight.

Throw memory loss, paralysis, blindness or brain damage onto your situation and would your mum still have a job?

 

[OspreyO]

Yup, I appreciate that - that's perhaps why in some cases simply having a multigenerational household is sufficient, especially if say dad goes out to work and mum looks after the house/kids + grandma for example.

No I'm just saying that the vast majority of people don't require 1 on 1 care 24/7, I don't have a hard opinion on whether to scale the allowance.

This isn't a game of averages. If a family is under resourced. It matter not one jot that they aren't typical example.

 

[robfosters]

Your lucky your mobile and your brain works fully as does your eyesight.

Throw memory loss, paralysis, blindness or brain damage onto your situation and would your mum still have a job?

Probably not, but then even with benefits, she’d be living on pathetic money for pretty much doing a full time job in caring for me.

All carers who work, but who still have to care for a loved one for 25 hours or more should be topped up if they earn under the average wage

 

[OspreyO]

In our case, at one point we had 3 or 4 people all needing our attention at the same time... That went on for years.

 

[Psycho Sonny]

Probably not, but then even with benefits, she’d be living on pathetic money for pretty much doing a full time job in caring for me.

All carers who work, but who still have to care for a loved one for 25 hours or more should be topped up if they earn under the average wage

You could say that about everything though.

What makes a carer more eligible for the top up over a single mother caring for young kids?

Opens a huge bag of worms you would need to top everyone up and there's simply not enough money to do that.

Also rich folk will have insurance to cover this scenario so politicians don't care. It's unfortunately a lose/lose situation.

There's so many things we should be doing better with but if it isn't going to cause an uprising / revolution or affect the rich then it will never happen.

If we did top everyone up the rich would need to pay for this top up.

 

[OspreyO]

It's really a reflection on society how they deal with vunerable in their society

 

[Psycho Sonny]

It's really a reflection on society how they deal with vunerable in their society

America is richer than us and look at how they treat the homeless and the sick.

No insurance you end up dying and homeless.

 

[OspreyO]

America is pretty bad unless you have money...

 

[GAC]

the whole jobs situation is just dumb for carers, now soon as i earn £1, boom i lose income support, prescriptions for free and dental payments for free (nhs only i think), then add on getting to work on top of that its a fair ole hit straight off the bat.

so 5 hours income straight away to cover the initial income support lose then say another hour for every day you have to travel to and from work, then as i get two medications a month thats 2 more hours to cover them. and toss another hour in for the dental costs so in all looking at 10 hours all in as probably having to work a couple of 5 hour shifts and that doesn't even bring in to account any possible council tax surprises as now the council see you as earning nearly £100 a week on top of carers so instantly think you are better off as income support isnt actually viewed as a income against council tax relief.

and the maximum from last april you can earn before it starts eating in to the carers benefit is £128 a week. so 13.89 hours min wage before you lose more money and have to work more hours to offset that.

as iv said earlier in the post iv asked what would happen say i had a mad week or month where i made well over the limit and if it would be set against that week/month or the years benefits and the dwp and jobcentre (thats who the dwp pass you to for advice on work stuff) at the time couldn't give a straight answer just that its all down to my circumstances even when i tried to run through a few examples they point blank dont have the ability to give any sort of rough estimates or advice. this is the most annoying part for me and probably many other carers who could get some work but want real help as to show how much better off they could be, and of course this doesn't bring in the issues if the person you are looking after takes a turn for the worse, all the dwp states for that is find a job with flexible working because obviously theres loads of them out there.

again im not expecting loads of money from the government but this year really has upset me, especially with the BILLIONS sloshed around through the pandemic and the possible ones coming next week in the budget, it seems for certain sections of society money can always be found.

 

[Psycho Sonny]

Sounds like your already receiving a lot of money and benefit tbh.

Free dental, prescription, healthcare, council tax, income support and carers.

What does all that add up to in a year? Then all the income and benefits your mum will be receiving too.

Sure it's not enough to live a luxury lifestyle but it's a lot more than what others get and the support the government has given to others wasn't enough either. Unless you think Debenhams, Topshop, Edinburgh woollen mill and the host of other places that have all closed their doors forever did it for a laugh. Restaurants have gone bust everywhere.

Mostly everyone apart from Amazon and the supermarkets has been effected negatively in a huge way by the pandemic.

 

[Mellowfellow]

I've always said carers allowance and income support is too low,considering that caring for someone is more or less a full time job , even more so a 24/7 call thing where if you have someone who needs help they might call you well outside sociable hours unlike most jobs .
My mum used to care for : my stepfather when he was ill with cancer for a year or more before passing away 10 years ago ,my grandfather who had the same illness and died nearly 6 years ago,
She now cares for her elderly neighbour getting shopping ,prescriptions ,and helping her tidy house and garden ,her partner who is older than her and has various ailments mainly heart , plus another elderly friend who is not very mobile. She's only allowed to get one lot of carers allowance and income support It's very little to survive on . Perhaps they should give her 40 hours of minimum wage at least ?

 

[GAC]

Sounds like your already receiving a lot of money and benefit tbh.

sigh again not what i was saying, its the fact the increase this year is ZERO. il say it AGAIN for the hard of reading im not expecting £50 a week raise here but at least to cover the raise in my bills you'd hope would be the least they could see to, rather than the vague bs about "the law says you can live on £XXX" when they refuse to actually say what the law actually says or how the math works out.

is a couple of quid a week too much to ask ?

im under no illusion about actually getting a income for being a carer but theres so much more they could do as far as assisting people but there just seems to be no interest in actually having that discussion outside of the line about always being better off in work, weather its true or not.

 

[Psycho Sonny]

sigh again not what i was saying, its the fact the increase this year is ZERO. il say it AGAIN for the hard of reading im not expecting £50 a week raise here but at least to cover the raise in my bills you'd hope would be the least they could see to, rather than the vague bs about "the law says you can live on £XXX" when they refuse to actually say what the law actually says or how the math works out.

is a couple of quid a week too much to ask ?

im under no illusion about actually getting a income for being a carer but theres so much more they could do as far as assisting people but there just seems to be no interest in actually having that discussion outside of the line about always being better off in work, weather its true or not.

There's civil servants out there that haven't had a rise in nearly 15 years.

People who are overworked, under appreciated, under resourced and up against people who are the exact opposite.

Austerity never ended for some and they bore the brunt of it too because they aren't as popular as teachers, nurses and the police.

So if those people that are working to keep the country running haven't had a rise in nearly 15 years then it's plausible to say that there isn't enough money for everyone and unfortunately those that aren't deemed popular have to go without.

If everyone was legally entitled to an above inflation rise yearly and this had to be backdated to when austerity started. Your talking a 40%+ rise for some people.

If you want to just say a rise in line with inflation your talking around 36.5%.

How do you propose money is raised for this during a pandemic where tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs and unemployment is at its highest rate in decades?

 

[neocon]

We have to pay higher taxes if we want better care for elderly.

 

[GAC]

listening to the bbc's money box program today about carers. there's 940k people getting carers allowance. so £1 a week increase would be less than £50 million. £100mil for a £2 weekly rise. says it all i guess.

and psycho sonny maybe a slight tax rise of 1p on fuel duty which would bring in 100's of millions a year.

 

[bloodiedathame]

The government is trillions in debt and yet they're still not spending enough.

There's enough, but they are way too flippant with how they spend it. coughTRACKANDTRACEcough

 

[Psycho Sonny]

listening to the bbc's money box program today about carers. there's 940k people getting carers allowance. so £1 a week increase would be less than £50 million. £100mil for a £2 weekly rise. says it all i guess.

and psycho sonny maybe a slight tax rise of 1p on fuel duty which would bring in 100's of millions a year.

You do realise fuel duty subsequently increases the cost of essentially everything?

So you pay more for food, deliveries, taxis, basically everything because without fuel nothing gets done.

So you want to raise the cost of living for everyone including those that haven't had a rise in 14 years and all those that have been made redundant due to the pandemic or suffering huge financial problems so carers get an extra £1-£2 per week.

Raising taxes isn't like a magic money tree. It causes the opposite effect elsewhere.

We also already have one of the highest fuel duties in the world if not the highest.

Raising fuel duty during a pandemic would be political suicide.

 

[GAC]

lets be honest here no matter what i suggest if its a tax rise you would moan about it.

 

[Psycho Sonny]

lets be honest here no matter what i suggest if its a tax rise you would moan about it.

I'm just saying that raising fuel duty hits everyone and it hits the poorest the most.

Had you suggested a tax on online businesses, the top 3%, businesses with extremely high turnover in the retail sector, people who have billions in trusts. Then it would be much more likely not to negatively affect the poorest as bad as fuel duty would.

 

[GAC]

I'm just saying that raising fuel duty hits everyone and it hits the poorest the most.

Had you suggested a tax on online businesses, the top 3%, businesses with extremely high turnover in the retail sector, people who have billions in trusts. Then it would be much more likely not to negatively affect the poorest as bad as fuel duty would.

the online tax has been looked at for years but no one will do it as they are terrified of of companies moving hq's and employing even more dubious tax dodging ways which no gov around the world seems willing to actually act on.