why unpaid carers struggle so much to be heard...

I think I've figured out why it's so difficult for the views and experiences of unpaid carers to be accepted by policy makers and government.

Along with a few million other people in the UK, I'm an unpaid carer - and I'm also self-employed; juggling earning a living alongside meeting the support needs of several immediate family members.

Over the last few years, I've been trying to wave a flag for those of us like me - because we're the only type of unpaid carer not currently recognised in law or policy (which means there's no support for us). This lack of support is also a problem for everyone else, because it means that our respective businesses are all under-performing: in the wider economy there's over £10Billion of lost/deferred job creation, investment, exporting, etc that isn't happening every year, because we're trying to figure how to support ourselves in reconciling these competing roles on our own.

A key way in which I've been able to have some small initial successes in attracting interest to the approaching 1million people / unpaid carers / small business owners who are in this circumstance is through research and data - without which, policy makers and membership bodies can't justify investing the time to investigate these issues more.

But recently, a comment by one of Directors at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) gave me reason to go back to basics with this - I'd referenced in conversation that most unpaid carers are just as likely to be men as they are women (in contrast to the typical general perception that it's usually women who take on caring roles). They challenged this by referencing the latest national census return, which CLES use as a baseline for all their policy work, as showing that it's actually predominately women who are unpaid carers. 

So I went back to the original source materials and realised that all the national government, health, policy, and support bodies are all working to a different understanding of who we are as unpaid carers.

It's shocking and depressing in equal measure - they all have different data about who unpaid carers are, and are using to base their support to us on. Is it any wonder then, that there's so much confusion about us, and why it's so hard for our voices to be heard? Because without a common agreement on how many of us are men, women, or other, each public body or agency can easily dismiss the research of others', on the basis that the starting point of identifying and understanding who carers are at such a fundamental level is so different to their own.

Can you see the confusion in the above chart?

• The government census shows a roughly 60/40 split in gender - but this survey was done in a global pandemic, and there's been questions subsequently raised by others about the validity of this finding, because of how the question on the census from was worded which likely led to many people not identifying themselves as carers when actually they are;
• Another government source (the DWP's family resources survey) has a different split at 66/33;
• x2 national public health sources (the national GP patients survey, and a national NHS survey) both have a big difference between them in how they've identified the gender split of unpaid carers;
• and the research by national bodies are who specifically created to understand and support carers have a notably different split again, at 50/50.

And this initial basic question of gender is also excluding people who don't identify along such binary f/m lines. 

So - if all the government bodies and statutory health services can't agree on such a simple basic starting point of 'what's the gender of unpaid carers?', then is it any wonder why carers are so mis-understood when it comes to us trying to share our experiences, or lobby for changes that would see us getting closer to being afforded the same recognitions as everyone who doesn't have caring responsibilities?

As for me - I've always generally aligned with the maxim "nothing about us without us". In this instance, that means I'm currently more trusting of data from carer support bodies, rather than distant civil servants whose own internal governmental departments and bodies can't agree on how far we may be made up of more than one gender than the other.