Which Political Party Will Look After Carers?

I was intent on maintaining an election-free zone here, but can't help noticing the ambivalent position of carers in this political race. The six million informal carers in Britain looking after family or friends who are frail, ill or disabled save the NHS and social services an estimated £87 billion, very often putting their own health and well-being in jeopardy through the demands of their caring responsibilities.

Gradually, in the last few years, the importance of carers has begun to be recognised, with social services obliged to make an assessment of the carer's needs, as well as the person they are caring for, and Carer's Allowance paying the royal sum of £53.90 a week to full-time carers, albeit at the cost of reducing other benefits and entitlements. With much fanfare, extra money was made available by the government to pay for respite breaks for carers - yet just last month, it was revealed that these funds were simply distributed to NHS trusts without ring-fencing, and perhaps predictably, most seems to have been spent on other things.

Carers have occasionally appeared in sharp focus in the election campaign, perhaps the most prominent example being Jonathan Bartley, the father of a young disabled boy, who confronted David Cameron with the painful and prolonged struggle his family had gone through to have their son's educational needs met as they wished - the underlying point being a mismatch between the political rhetoric and experience on the ground, as it were. Whilst much has been said about providing education for disabled children in the mainstream, rather than segregating them in special schools, the resources needed to achieve this (rather like the funding for those desirable respite breaks for carers) haven't materialised, leaving a situation where families feel cheated of what they have been told they can expect from the system, and only those with the most determination and resilience stand a chance of winning through.

I can just imagine how up for a battle with local bureaucracy you feel on top of being a full-time carer.

None of the main parties are saying much about carers: they all need them to carry on doing the awesome job they do, saving the vast amounts of money that would otherwise have to be found to replace them, I just wonder how their fragile support system will stand up to the cost savings that have to be made?