We need a care income. Here is why the argument is stronger than you think.

The objection is always the same: we cannot afford it. A care income — a payment to people who are providing unpaid care for children or other dependants — is dismissed as utopian, as unaffordable, as a distraction from more practical policy.

But we have never seriously asked what it costs us not to have one. And when you start to add up those costs — in mental health, in child poverty, in the long-term consequences of raising a generation of children in financial stress — the argument for a care income starts to look not just compelling, but urgent.

What unpaid care work is worth

The Office for National Statistics has estimated that unpaid care work in the UK is worth approximately 1.24 trillion pounds per year — more than the entire output of the NHS. This is not a marginal activity. It is the foundation on which the paid economy rests.

And yet it is invisible in our economic accounting. GDP does not capture it. Tax policy does not recognise it. The benefits system treats it as a reason for reduced entitlement, not as a contribution that deserves support.

The mental health cost

Single parents report significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, and stress than partnered parents. This is not surprising. They are carrying the full weight of household management, childcare, and — in many cases — the emotional labour of managing a child's relationship with an absent parent, while also navigating a benefits system that treats them with suspicion.

The mental health cost of this is not just a personal tragedy. It is a public health crisis. Children whose parents are struggling with their mental health have worse outcomes across every measure. The cost of not supporting carers shows up, years later, in NHS waiting lists, in school exclusions, in the criminal justice system.

The child poverty argument

More than four million children in the UK are living in poverty. The majority of them are in single-parent households. Child poverty is not a natural disaster. It is a policy choice — the cumulative result of decisions about benefits, about wages, about childcare, about housing.

A care income would not solve child poverty on its own. But it would address one of its root causes: the fact that the person primarily responsible for a child's welfare is often unable to earn enough to support them, because the work of caring for that child is itself a full-time job.

What a care income would look like

There are different models. Some proposals are universal — a payment to all carers, regardless of income. Others are means-tested. Some are tied to the age of the child; others to the intensity of the care provided.

The details matter, and they are worth debating. But the debate needs to start from the premise that unpaid care work has value, that the people who do it deserve support, and that the current system — which effectively penalises people for caring — is not working.

The affordability question

Can we afford it? The question assumes that the current situation is free. It is not. We are paying for the absence of a care income in NHS costs, in educational underachievement, in the long-term consequences of child poverty. We are just paying later, and paying more, and paying in ways that are harder to see.

The question is not whether we can afford a care income. It is whether we can afford to keep pretending that the work of raising children is not work at all.