Care-giving: the costs and cracks in the housing system

The cost to carers themselves is staggering. Seventy per cent report long-term physical or mental health conditions, nearly 80% say they feel stressed or anxious, and almost half experience depression. Carer’s Allowance remains under £85 per week. These are the social and financial foundations upon which much of our housing fragility rests.

Caring creates spatial needs: adaptations, ground-floor access, space for medical equipment and privacy for dependants. But it also generates spatial vulnerabilities – to debt, to downsizing, to substandard homes. Yet, unlike ageing or disability, caring has no material signifier in planning systems. It is a social role without a spatial plan.

This disconnect becomes especially clear when caring ends. One third of carers surveyed said they were worried about their housing situation once their caring role finishes – this a staggering finding that underlines the precarity that often goes unspoken. We are quick to talk about pathways into care, but we are far slower to recognise the cliff edge that may follow.

The Carers UK report once again reminds us of vital intersections: between housing and care-giving, gender and ethnicity, ageing and interdependence. After all, caring is not distributed equally. The survey shows that women, older people and people from minority ethnic backgrounds are both more likely to be carers and more likely to face housing stress. This reflects wider structural patterns: the racialised and gendered character of housing disadvantage, the squeezing out of low-income families from housing markets, and the fraying of the social safety net in the name of austerity and efficiency.

What can housing policy do? 

Housing policy could do more to help. First, housing needs assessments, both at the national and local levels, must get smarter at identifying and integrating caring roles into planning. This means mapping how many households contain a carer, how many homes are designed or adaptable for long-term caring, and how housing tenure affects the capacity to care.

Second, social landlords and local authorities must develop clearer protocols to prevent post-caring homelessness. Just as bereavement support has entered health conversations, there should be provision for people at risk of losing their home when a caring role ends. 

Third, the intersection of social security and housing support needs urgent reform. When Carer’s Allowance is worth less than £85 per week and Universal Credit rules penalise joint-income households with caring duties, it is no surprise that carers are overrepresented in poverty and insecure housing.

Finally, we need to reframe caring itself. As the report argues, it is not a personal burden, but a social good – one that deserves to be supported structurally, not shouldered silently. If we took caring seriously as infrastructure, housing policy would look very different.

Behind the statistics are people spending their lives navigating impossible choices. As one carer in the survey in the report put it: “Sold my dream home and now live in [a] housing executive home. Couldn’t afford a mortgage, now the rent is nearly as high as my mortgage was. It’s hopeless.”

We owe carers more than hope; we owe them a housing system that sees and supports them.

Phil Brown, professor of housing and communities, University of Huddersfield, and member, Thinkhouse Editorial Panel

This article is from Thinkhouse, a website set up to be a repository of housing research. Its editorial panel critiques the best of the most recent housing research