Four million people are invisible to the current social care system and today’s speech from Andy Burnham must be the start of changing that.
Carents welcomes Prime Minister Andy Burnham's commitment to social care reform and the announcement today of three significant steps: the acceleration of the Casey review, an immediate focus on the paid care workforce, and the initiation of cross-party talks. These are meaningful moves. But there also needs to be a focus on those that provide family support and the toll that can take on their own health, work and finances.
Carents - the 4 million adults in the UK who contribute an estimated £100 billion in unpaid care for their ageing parents each year - are the largest group in a caring role in the country, the majority of them women. Most do not recognise themselves in the word "carer".
Andy Burnham spoke today about his father - he described watching care workers support him with skill, professionalism and compassion. As the son of a man living with Alzheimer's, navigating care alongside his own life, he is not only an observer of this system, he is one of 4 million carents. We hope that personal knowledge shapes the reform he is promising.
"We have spent six years trying to provide support to this group and make them visible. The Prime Minister knows what it's like to be a carent. We hope that personal knowledge shapes what a national care service looks like from the outside."
Baroness Casey said this morning: "if we did a better job before, we would never have to have an after. "89% of carents say support only arrives once things have already broken down (Carents, The Hidden Toll, 2026). A national care service built on the same design will only produce the same result.
Our two latest reports set out both the scale of that gap and what needs to change. The Hidden Toll, explored the lives of 4,293 adults supporting their ageing parents in the UK, and found that 96% are always on alert even when not physically with their parent, 75% feel they receive less sympathy and recognition than new parents . Dementia: Who Really Cares?, drawing on experiences of 2,016 people caring for a parent with dementia, found that only 14% had accessed any form of respite care, and that 81% say society treats their role as "just what you do."
We welcome The Big Conversation that Baroness Casey is leading. It is the right instinct and long overdue. But a national conversation that does not proactively reach carents, using language they recognise, will produce the same blind spot as every previous review. We are calling for carents to be specifically and proactively included in that process.
Our ask is specific. Recognise carenthood as a distinct life stage. Not as unpaid carers, nor as a subset of family carers, but as a predictable milestone that the majority will experience that needs its own recognition, infrastructure, and place in national care planning.
Carenthood can be planned for, by families, by employers, and by government. Today's speech undoubtedly acknowledged the scale of the problem but the next step is naming the people living it.
