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Carers Week 2025: launching our Carers’ Survey 2025

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To mark Carers Week 2025 (9-15 June), the FDA is launching a survey of carers in the civil service to find out what progress has been made since our 2021 report, and what still needs to be done.

Each year Carers Week focuses on raising awareness of unpaid carers and celebrates the huge contribution they make to society. It not only  highlights the challenges carers face at home, but in the workplace too. The theme for 2025 is ‘Caring About Equality’ and highlights the inequalities unpaid carers can face, including in the workplace. Find out more about Carers Week on their website.

A carer is someone who provides unpaid care and support to a family member or friend. Carers might care for someone who is disabled, has an illness or mental health condition, or someone who may need extra help as they grow older. In 2020, the FDA asked its members about their caring responsibilities and released a report in 2021.

Our recommendations following our research in 2020/2021 were:

  1. The Carer’s passport is an excellent tool, but line managers need to better understand how to adapt and use it. We’d like to see training available to ensure that managers are able to support members who approach them, seeking to formalise adjustments to support their caring;
  2. A dedicated HR point of contact in each employer, so that members who are facing difficulty balancing their caring responsibilities have a source of independent impartial support. This HR contact should also be available for new starters who face issues having the recommendations in their passport adopted, and provide additional support to line managers;
  3. Formalising caring arrangements should be the default – managers should proactively ask staff to undertake a Carer’s Passport and ensure that if circumstances change, they are taken into account;
  4. There should be an enforceable time limit for completing, agreeing and actioning the Carer’s Passport. Employers should commit to actioning agreed changes within eight weeks.

Since 2020 The Carer’s Leave Regulations 2024 have been introduced following The Carer’s Leave Act (2023). These changes came into effect on 6 April 2024. New Cabinet Office model guidance on carers leave has been sent to departments.

The Carer’s Leave Act covers employees in England, Wales and Scotland and introduced:

  1. Entitlement to one week’s unpaid leave per year if providing or arranging care for someone with a long-term care need.
  2. The option to take leave flexibly (in half or full days) for planned caring commitments.
  3. Entitlement available from the first day of employment.
  4. The same employment protections for employees as other forms of family-related leave, including protection from dismissal.

Five years on from our Carers Survey in 2020 we want to hear again from our members with caring responsibilities about their experiences now so we can see what progress has been made in supporting civil servants to complete Carers Passports, take Carers Leave, and how their working lives have changed.

If you are a civil servant and a carer, take part in our survey to have your say.

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