Invaluable

We have been campaigning with our members to persuade the Treasury to adjust their Self-employed income support scheme (SEISS) scheme, which replaces lost profits for self-employed people losing work during COVID-19, for Shared Lives carers, who can apply to the scheme, but typically aren’t eligible for any replacement income, because the Shared Lives tax break usually shows their profits as zero. This has left Shared Lives carers feeling unvalued and contemplating leaving the sector, just at a moment when we desperately need to sustain and expand home-based alternatives to hospital and care homes.

So we are utterly disappointed that the SEISS has not been adjusted by the Treasury to address this, despite our very positive engagement with the Dept of Health and Social Care, and the support expressed for the Shared Lives sector by the Minister of Care Helen Whateley and cross-party MPs, including the Shadow Health team and Labour party leader Sir Keir Starmer. We have been contacted by MPs of all parties as a result of the campaigning which Shared Lives carers have been doing on this issue locally.

In parallel to our national lobbying, we have been working with councils to encourage them to use their social care continuity funding to help Shared Lives carers who have lost income, and also the even larger numbers who are providing more support than ever to someone who lives with them, and cannot at present access day support services. We have many examples of councils doing this and we are talking with the Dept Health and Social Care, and the Local Government Association about how to help more areas to follow suit.

Money can be a touchy subject for Shared Lives carers. There are still areas where people have been caring without a pay rise for years: pre-COVID we were working on this with members, asking councils to sign up to a pledge to give Shared Lives carers the same pay increases as other social care workers. I’m struck by the attitude of one or two areas who seem to feel that because Shared Lives carers give so much of their lives, and don’t expect to be paid for every hour spent with someone, that they shouldn’t really care about money. Some of our members said recently that they feel treated with suspicion if they raise the subject.

The truth is that we all need to live. The fact that our members are often staggeringly generous shouldn’t be a reason to take them for granted, as one area did when they wrote a Shared Lives carer in her 70s to say that with day services closed, the person she cares for would be home with her all day now, and they expected her to provide this extra full time job of care on a ‘voluntary’ unpaid basis.

Shared Lives works so well because it allows people to separate the money that they are paid for the formal part of their role, from their relationship with an individual who many describe as ‘just one of the family’. Nobody goes into Shared Lives for the money. Let’s make sure during this crisis that money is not the reason that anyone has to leave the caring role they love.