Rachel Reeves has a chance to pull millions of unpaid carers out of crisis - will she take it?
10 June 2025, 09:27
There’s an irony that Carers Week this year falls in the same week as the Spending Review.
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The week’s theme of “caring about equality” is particularly biting, with one in four adult carers and two million child carers already living in poverty.
Unpaid care has long been viewed as a domestic, individualised activity. As such, it has been treated by successive governments as a cost and burden to both our society and economy. At Care Full we think it’s time we reevaluated care’s place in a 21st century society.
Care will likely play a part in all our lives. As more of us have long-term health problems, health innovation means we can live longer and survive diseases that would have killed us thirty years ago.
The Spending Review will be peppered with phrases that reinforce this narrative - “hard-working families,” the “economically inactive,” growth, growth, growth - while actively ignoring the millions of acts of unpaid care that take place every day on which our economy is built.
The new Labour government promised transformation, yet nearly a year in, we seem stuck in an austerity mindset. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have an opportunity to improve the lives of carers in the UK, but we need to start from a place that sees care as foundational to our society. To enable this, we must radically reimagine our policy landscape.
On Wednesday, Rachel Reeves can do some simple things that will immediately prevent devastation for unpaid carers:
- Get rid of the cliff-edge in Carers Allowance and cancel all carers allowance debt.
- Rethink the changes to PIP and Universal Credit, and immediately help 150k unpaid carers.
- Implement a wealth tax. As the gap between haves and have-nots grows exponentially, we have to recognise that the super-rich are more detrimental to society than those who are supported by social security.
I often think about what my great-grandparents would have thought in the 1920s if I’d told them that their children and all their descendants would have access to universal healthcare. When the Labour government recognised that health was foundational to a successful society, it was transformational for the 20th century.
If our current Labour government wants to be truly transformational, it could take a leaf out of Attlee’s book and make care a foundational part of our economy.
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Ruth Hannan is co-founder (with Hannah Webster) of Care Full.
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