Who Cares? Helping London's Unpaid Carers
Like the rest of the country, London runs on unpaid care. The 2011 census indicates that over 687,000 Londoners spend at least an hour a week caring for someone. That’s 8.5% of the population. Largely because London has a younger population, a lower proportion of people here give unpaid care than in other regions. Nonetheless, London has the third highest number of unpaid carers among English regions.
Across the UK, 5.4 million people, including more than 100,000 children, provide unpaid care.2 These millions regularly help someone else, usually a family member, with washing, shopping, cleaning, cooking, and many more tasks to enable that person to get by. While nearly everyone helps family, friends or neighbours sometimes, an unpaid carer is someone who does this on a regular basis. Unpaid care as measured by the census, where most data comes from, does not include routine childcare.
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