Care news

• Lemn Sissay: ‘brilliant’ plans to improve child social care ignored by ministers

  19-04-2024 14:34
  
  Poet says government has not acted on 2022 MacAlister review because reforming system is not a vote winnerUK politics – latest updatesThe poet and broadcaster Lemn Sissay has accused ministers of ignoring “brilliant” recommendations to improve the “dysfunctional” children’s social care system in England because they are not vote winners.Sissay, whose bestselling memoir My Name Is Why was a reflection on his own childhood in care, said the government had &ldquo
  
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• Of course a society that demonises poverty will try to prosecute vulnerable, unpaid carers | Zoe Williams

  19-04-2024 09:00
  
  The scandal, revealed by the Guardian, didn’t occur in a vacuum. The right’s casting of the poor as parasitic benefits cheats underpins it allThe unpaid carer’s allowance in this country is £81.90 a week. It’s hard to see what serious thought went into arriving at that figure – any calculation of how much it costs to live on, for instance, or how much an unpaid carer is saving the government. Being without discernible curiosity about the lives of unpaid carers
  
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• ‘Humiliated’: carer made to pay back £3.8k after mistake declaring income

  19-04-2024 08:00
  
  Davina Ware applied for benefits to help look after husband Mike, 72, who has lived with Parkinson’s for 20 yearsThe pain cuts through Davina Ware’s voice as she describes her experience of carer’s allowance, the meagre weekly benefit given to those heralded by the government as Britain’s “unsung heroes”.She feels “humiliated,” “devastated,” and “treated like a conniving thief” by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) s
  
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