Rishi Sunak faced questions from MPs on the Commons Treasury committee this month over his budget, which combines emergency Covid support schemes with the biggest tax rises since 1993. And while it is right to question his plans to cut the £20 a week universal credit uplift after six months or find out why 39 out of 45 towns that will benefit from the £1bn new “towns fund” are represented by Tory MPs, I couldn’t help but see an obvious oversight in much of the post-budget discussion: where are t

Last year, the health and social care select committee highlighted the social care system as “unfair, confusing, demeaning and frightening for the most vulnerable people in our society and their families”. But while the select committee’s report stressed the need to address challenges for our elderly population and care workers, one group seems to have been forgotten yet again: unpaid carers.

These are the people who provide health or supportive care to an ageing parent, a family member or chil

As we all, in our own individual ways, take a moment to think of those working in our hospitals still smiling while wearing bin bags in their desperate last stand, or those with faces sore, striped with bruises from heavy-duty masks, I will think of my mum, an unpaid carer, and just one of many who have been completely and utterly let down by this government.

My mum has been an unpaid carer to my sister, Charlotte, who has severe autism, for over 29 years. It is a 24 hour, 7 days a week job.

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