Wendy Chamberlain

I am grateful to the hon. Member. I will be saying a bit about young carers, but carer’s allowance, which I am talking about at the moment, does need reform. My understanding, from speaking to colleagues, is that young people undertaking T-levels are potentially losing out on carer’s allowance because of the number of hours they are required to do. I am sure that that oversight needs to be corrected. When unpaid carers are told that they can work only 13 hours a week at the national minimum wage—the number of hours keeps going down because of how the calculations are made—without losing their benefits, when they are left struggling because carer’s allowance provides the lowest level of benefits of its kind, and when systems are set up so that unpaid carers find themselves thousands of pounds in debt from inadvertent overpayments, that inevitably has an impact on their own health and ability to provide care to their loved ones. The resilience of our ageing population is also very much in the remit of the Department of Health and Social Care. We know that pensioner poverty is deeply linked to health outcomes and the demand for NHS services during the cold winter months. We also know that providing care during someone’s working years means missing out on vital opportunities to save for retirement, leading to a much higher prevalence of poverty among unpaid carers. I appreciate that the Minister can control pensions, but I want to mention another thing outwith his remit: education. Being a young carer is more uncommon than being an adult carer, but the impact over that person’s whole life is so much greater, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) said.