Carers Week 2024 will run from the 10th – 16th June 2024. The theme of this years Carers Week will be 'Putting Carers on the Map'. Working carers now make up approximately 11% of the working population (i.e. 1 in 9 employees).
Carers Week
Carers Week is an annual campaign run by a number of charities, including Carers UK, to raise awareness of the challenges faced by unpaid carers, including working carers.
The theme of this years Carers Week will be 'putting carers on the map'. The organisers state that they hope to "galvanize activity in a general election year, to highlight the increasing pressures [upon] carers and to campaign for much-needed recognition and support. This includes raising awareness about the challenges carers face which impact on their finances, employment, health and wellbeing and ensuring policymakers and politicians take steps to better support carers’ needs."
In terms of the agenda for Carers Week 2024, Wednesday 12th June 2024 will focus upon work and employment, and issues relating to working carers.
Working Carers
Campaigning over recent years has delivered two significant breakthroughs over the last couple of years in terms of new legislation to support working carers.
Firstly, the Carer’s Leave Act 2023 came into force on the 6th April 2024 and provides working carers with 1 week’s unpaid leave per annum.
The Chief Executive of Carers UK, Helen Walker, welcomed this new legislation. She stated: "The Carer’s Leave Act coming into force is a huge step forward for millions of carers, which recognises the vital importance of their caring role and empowers them to ask for support in the workplace – in the form of unpaid Carer’s Leave – knowing that they have a legal entitlement to this. Juggling work with caring responsibilities isn’t easy and without the right support, this can take its toll. Too many skilled and valued workers are leaving employment due to the stress of balancing work and unpaid care."
Nevertheless, Carers UK and other charities would like the Government to go further. Helen Walker, for instance, contends that: “In the longer term, we would like to see Carer’s Leave paid but…this [legislation is] a very important step in recognising and supporting carers in employment.“
The second piece of new legislation is the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023. This also came into force on the 6th April 2024, and provides workers, including working carers, with a day 1 right to request flexible working (as opposed to the previous position of 6 months).
Commenting upon the new flexible working legislation, the head of employment and specialist delivery at Carers UK, Katherine Wilson, stated: "The ability for unpaid carers – from the first day of their employment – to ask their employer for changes to their working hours, times of work, or place of work will make a real difference to employees who are balancing work and unpaid care. Being able to ask for a different flexible working arrangement more than once a year will be a huge help too."
Carers UK point out that there are "as many as 7.7 million [working carers] in the UK [that] now juggle their unpaid caring responsibilities with paid employment."
Making Caring A Protected Characteristic
Another campaign that Carers UK are running to improve the position of working carers is to make caring the 10th protected characteristic under the Equality Act, as we highlighted in a previous article.
The only protection that working carers currently have under the Equality Act 2010 is under section 13, which covers discrimination by association. Carers UK contend that that only provides working carers with limited protection, arguing that whilst the “provision is important,…..the law is not clearly written and understandable. It is also not as direct as the nine protected characteristics which are clearly stated.“
