Welcome to the fourth instalment of our blog series ‘Inclusive Excellence: Incorporating life into equitable workplaces', which is addressing how workplaces can strive to create inclusive and equitable cultures through thought leadership from leading charities and organisations.

In this edition, we are thrilled to feature insights from Katherine Wilson, Head of Employment and Specialist Delivery at Carers UK.

Katherine recently joined the ABI DEI Network to discuss the latest facts about the growing cohort of workers with caring responsibilities, their new rights under the Carer’s Leave Act 2023, and practical insights from employers on supporting carers at work.

A few months on, she shares further thoughts on identifying staff with caring responsibilities and how forward-looking employers are supporting them.

Time to start caring with Carers UK

Author: Katherine Wilson

Who are carers? 

Supporting an older, disabled or ill family member or friend is something that we often just do without seeing ourselves as a carer. Sometimes it can be sudden: someone you love is taken ill or has an accident, your child is born with a disability. For others caring may creep up unnoticed: your parents can’t manage on their own any longer, or your partner’s health gets gradually worse.

How many people are working and caring?

According to the latest Census there are 5.7 million unpaid carers in the UK, around one in eleven people, including 2.5 million who are also in paid employment across England and Wales. However, Carers UK’s polling research has shown that the numbers of working carers could be even higher: at least one in seven in any workplace.  Yet caring is often still invisible in many workplaces, with carers ‘hidden in plain sight’.

Why does this matter?

Without support in the workplace, many employees are at risk of giving up work to care. Carers UK's research shows that on average, 600 people a day leave work to care if unsupported.

And as our population lives longer with illness and disability, more and more workers will be caring. Already the average person has a 50:50 chance of caring by age 50 – long before they reach retirement, with half of women caring by age 46. With the number of people in the UK aged 85 years plus predicted to double in the next 20 years, caring is only going to become more significant. So, supporting carers in the workplace not only matters to employees but also to employers. There are also clear business benefits for employers who address this issue - and risks for those who ignore it. For example, Centrica, one of the founding members of Carers UK’s business forum Employers for Carers, has experienced estimated yearly savings of £1.8 million through reduced unplanned staff absences and a further £1.3 million per annum in retention savings as highlighted in their business case.

What can employers do?

Experience from Employers for Carers shows that taking the following steps can help to address carers’ needs and support staff retention and resilience:

• Make caring visible – be explicit and talk about caring, and carers, in your workplace. Using a simple and inclusive definition, for example like the one used by Employers for Carers below, can help:
  
  Carers are employees with caring responsibilities that have an impact on their working lives. These employees are responsible for the care and support of ill, older or disabled family members, partners or friends who are unable to care for themselves.

• Talk about the support you offer – carers often value flexible working and leave arrangements, and health and wellbeing schemes and staff support groups can also help. Communicating openly to employees and managers about workplace support, and how this may be relevant for anyone who may be caring, will help to raise awareness.
  
  For example, the Carer’s Leave Act 2023, which came into force in April this year, is an excellent opportunity to promote your leave arrangements for carers, as well as any other specific support that you offer. Using specific awareness raising opportunities such as Carers Week (in June) and Carers Rights Day (in November) can also help.

• Help carers to identify themselves – each year millions of people take on caring responsibilities whilst caring comes to an end for millions of others. So, be aware that carers are a changing population and think about different ways of getting the right information to employees at the right time.
  
  For example, try using a range of different channels to raise awareness and communicate support such as staff intranets, payslips, handbooks, all-staff bulletins and through internal social media platforms.

What are good practice employers doing to support carers?

Here are some examples from our Employers for Carers (EfC) forum which provides practical, ‘hands on’ help to organisations to take these steps to support and retain carers in their workplace: 

Good practice along these lines from Employers for Carers – which includes a number of ABI members such as Aviva and Phoenix Group - has formed the basis of our employer benchmarking scheme Carer Confident which provides a practical framework for implementing support in the workplace.

What next for carers in the workplace?

Carers UK has welcomed the commitment in the King’s Speech in Parliament on 17 July to introduce an Employment Rights Bill and provisions for workers - these should go some way to help unpaid carers remain in work and we’ll be following further developments closely. We’d also like to see a swift review looking at the benefits of paid Carer’s Leave as we believe these combined measures would make a significant different to unpaid carers’ lives. So watch this space!

Interestingly, our research has also shown that the biggest challenge for working carers is the lack of affordable and accessible care services, with only 9% of working carers stating that they had access to affordable social care whilst in employment.

This is also of increasing concern to employers, according to EfC’s (Employers for Carers) findings 63% of member organisations say that social care is core to the wellbeing of their employees.

So, if care services are reduced or put under pressure, it becomes harder to juggle work and care, whatever workplace flexibility is offered. Employers and employees, of course, have no control over this external factor so this is an issue which needs to be addressed within the wider national policy agenda. 

But what can we do as employers and employees in the meantime? This year the theme of our annual Carers Week awareness raising campaign was Putting Carers on the Map. There is a role for us all here in raising awareness and signposting carers to support in the workplace, whether we are carers, colleagues or managers – it’s never been a more important time to talk about carers in the workplace!

Resources for ABI Member firms

Together with our members, we are

committed to supporting carers within the insurance and long-term savings sector. As part of our DEI Blueprint, one of our key priorities under the ‘Grow’ theme is to create environments that retain people even when their circumstances change or they experience significant life events. We are committed to working with industry peers to create supportive environments for employees with caring responsibilities. More information can be found on our DEI Hub.

The ABI will continue to facilitate the sharing of best practices among different ABI members through our DEI Network, where Carers UK presented at the time of the launch of the Carer’s Leave Act 2023.

Read more from our Inclusive Excellence Blog Series
< Part 3: Mental Health Matters in the Workplace with Rethink Mental Illness