Carers Week 2025: Caring About Equality
What does it mean to be a carer?
A carer is someone who looks after a family member or friend with a disability, mental or physical illness, addiction, or who is experiencing challenges with getting older. Carers UK leads the annual Carers Week event to highlight the challenges that carers face, particularly carers who are not paid for their contributions to families and communities throughout the UK.
This year’s theme, “Caring About Equality” focuses on the inequalities faced by unpaid carers. This includes unpaid carers’ greater risks of poverty, social isolation, and poor mental and physical health, all of which can result in carers missing out on educational, career-related, or other personal opportunities.
Each day of Carers Week 2025 will focus on a different aspect of being a carer.
- Monday: Health and social care
- Tuesday: Financial wellbeing
- Wednesday: Work and employment
- Thursday: Younger carers
- Friday: Older carers
- Saturday: Mental health and wellbeing
- Sunday: Reflections on Carers Week
To learn more about Carers Week 2025, click here.
What does it mean to be a young carer?
Young carers are those under the age of 18 who look after family members or friends with physical or mental health conditions or problems with drugs or alcohol. There are a significant number of young people throughout the UK with caring responsibilities. The Office for National Statistics’ 2021 census reported 120,000 young carers between ages 5-18 in England, while the 2023 school census suggested there were 39,000 “known” young carers in the UK.
Young carers can struggle to balance their caring responsibilities with educational or personal duties, leading to greater anxiety and stress, missing school, and social isolation from friends and peers.
To learn more about being a young carer, click here.
Getting support as a carer
There are plenty of resources available to help carers find community and support – whether that’s financial or other practical support - to help make carers’ lives easier.
The Children and Families Act 2014 and the Care Act 2014 strengthened the rights of young carers by requiring local authorities to offer needs assessments, regardless of the carer’s age, along with transition assessments when they turn 18 years.
If you are a carer looking to get support for someone you care for, you can get a Care Needs Assessment from Westminster City Council. This assessment will help the council determine the support that you or the person you care for are entitled to.
To find more information about Care Needs Assessments, click here.
Carers Network is an independent charity that also supports carers across the UK by offering free, practical and personalised advice on a range of issues affecting unpaid carers in particular. If you are an adult unpaid carer supporting someone over 18 who lives in Westminster, you can access support by registering through their online form.
