Barbara Keeley was sent the following response to the Carers Strategy petition. The e-petition obtained 2,124 signatures between January and July 2018. This petition was handed into parliament in November 2018 to obtain a response from the Department of Health and Social Care. This response is below:

.....towards the end of 2017 ministers took the decision not to go forward with publishing a National Carers Strategy so that carers could be considered as part of the forthcoming Green Paper on care and support. The Green Paper will be published at the earliest opportunity and will include a focus on how we support carers as part of a sustainable health and care system. In the meantime, in order to demonstrate how the Government was continuing to support informal (unpaid) carers, we published a Carers Action Plan on 5 June 2018. The Carers Action Plan sets out a cross-Government programme of targeted work to support carers over the next two years.


We Care's response

Individual carers, their families and supporters have been badly let down over the decision not to go forward with the Carers Strategy. Worse still is the government's hollow promise that carers will be considered as part of the Green Paper on care and support. Carers have sadly grown used to this repeated inaction and their issues being glossed over. The Green Paper has been repeatedly delayed from an original publication date of Summer 2017. We are still waiting...