Introduction: Your rights across the UK
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If you’re aged 25 or under and care for a family member or friend with an illness, disability, mental health problem or an addiction, this guide is for you.
Whether you are a young carer (aged under 18) or a young adult carer (aged between 18 and 25), you have rights. It’s important for you, and your family, to know your rights so you can get the help you need.
Many young carers, and organisations like Carers Trust, have campaigned to win these rights to make life easier and fairer for all young carers.
Your rights across the UK
There are different laws in each of the four nations of the UK; England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. But wherever you live, you have the right:
- To be given the information you need.
- To have an assessment of your own needs.
And, most importantly, the services that are there to help you, and the person you care for, must make sure you are not taking on “inappropriate levels of caring”.
This means education, health and social services shouldn’t expect or allow you to care for someone if that:
- makes you feel worried, sad or lonely.
- makes your health worse.
- means that you miss out on time with friends.
- means you do worse at school, college or university.
- stops you finding or keeping a job.
- stops you wanting to achieve your goals for the future.
These rights apply to all young carers, no matter how young they are or who they care for. So they apply to you whether you’re 5, 15 or 22 years old, and whether you care for a parent, sibling or grandparent.
A ‘whole family approach’
To make sure young carers get the support they need, services such as local authorities, hospitals, doctors and mental health services should work together to make sure there is support for everyone in the family. You may hear this described as using a ‘whole family approach’.
Any support for an adult or child who has health and care needs should not rely on a young carer providing support which is inappropriate or excessive.
Find out more about the specific laws for young carers where you live:
Young Carers Rights in England
Young Carers Rights in Northern Ireland
Throughout this guide, we use ‘young carer’ to describe someone who is under 18. But in Scotland, 18-year-old carers are still counted as young carers while they’re at school.
We’ve also used ‘young adult carer’ to describe carers aged between 18 and 25. But there are some services for young adult carers that also support 16 and 17-year-olds to help them prepare for when they turn 18.