Written question WQ99735

I am very pleased that we will be publishing our new National Strategy for Unpaid Carers in the Autumn. This has been developed after extensive engagement with unpaid carers and their representatives. The final version of the strategy will also benefit from the findings of the Health and Social Care Committee's inquiry into support for unpaid carers.

We are giving careful consideration to the report and recommendations of the Health and Social Care Committee and will be issuing our response to the committee in September. The national strategy will be published as soon as possible after this.

The new strategy will provide the Welsh Government, local authorities, health boards, education and the third sector with clear and unambiguous actions that are needed to to improve the identification, support and services available to unpaid carers across Wales. It is a blueprint to use by which we can address those issues that carers tell us are most important for them.

It is the responsibility of those organisations to ensure their local policies, practice and services fulfil these actions. We will continue to identify means by which we can better identify and drive improvement and address areas where we are not seeing sufficient progress.

We are continuing to support the Welsh Government Short Breaks Scheme and Carers Support Fund, to ensure carers can receive emergency financial support and breaks from caring. These schemes are provided in addition to the statutory duties of local authorities and health boards when it comes to unpaid carers. We are also funding our national carer organisations to deliver programmes to ensure greater identification of carers, as well as professional awareness and advice and wellbeing support. We are pursuing improved data collection on carers of all ages to inform our policies and are exploring greater cross-government working for the benefit of unpaid carers.

We will be publishing a report on the responses to the public consultation on the new National Strategy for Unpaid Carers in the next few weeks. This report will provide comprehensive information relating to the responses to each of the consultation questions and will identify themes and areas where respondents have stated where we can strengthen the strategy further. We will not be publishing each of the 130 responses, due to the high volume of responses. We consider the report which collates responses to be sufficiently robust and providing a detailed analysis of the responses we have received. Full individual responses will be made available on request.

I have written to Sir Stephen Timms, Minister of State for Social Security and Disability about Carer’s Allowance, which is subject to current review and public consultation by the UK Government. I have requested a meeting and await his response.