What is a carer's assessment?

It exists because a family carer doing the mornings, the medication and the worry is doing real work, whether or not anyone is paying for it, and because a council that only ever looks at the person receiving care can miss the point at which the person giving it breaks down too. Three groups have this right, each under a different piece of law, and each depends on different things.

Most people reading this page are on the first route: an adult caring for a parent, a partner or a friend. If your relative has also asked for, or is about to ask for, a care needs assessment, the two can be done together, but neither one waits for the other. It is also a different thing entirely from Carer's Allowance, which is a weekly payment with its own hours and earnings tests. You can have a carer's assessment whatever your hours look like, and whether or not you claim anything at all.

The outcomes below are what condition two is measured against. Your relative needs two or more of theirs out of reach; you need only one, or evidence that your own physical or mental health is already suffering because of the caring.

"Unable to achieve" is read generously. It covers needing somebody's help, managing only with real distress, and taking far longer over something than anyone reasonably could be expected to. A daughter who still gets to her own gym class, but only by cancelling it most weeks, is unable to achieve the recreation outcome in the sense the law means, and it is worth saying so in those words rather than "I still just about manage."

1. 1

   Find the right council

   Five minutes

   Adult social care at the council where the person you care for lives, whatever your own address is. Search the council's name with "carer's assessment", or phone if the need is urgent.
2. 2

   Ask for a carer's assessment, in those words

   The same day

   You can ask for it alongside a needs assessment for the person you care for, or entirely on its own. It does not depend on theirs happening first, or on the outcome of it.
3. 3

   Write down a bad week, not a good one

   Before the call

   What you do, how long it takes, and what you have stopped doing because of it, night as well as day. Families under-report almost every time, because the week that comes to mind first is a manageable one.
4. 4

   Say what you want, not just what you are coping with

   At the assessment

   An evening out, a weekend away, a night without waking, going back to work. The plan is meant to be built around that, and it carries real weight in the wellbeing test.

The assessment itself might be a face-to-face meeting, a phone call, or an online form followed up with a call, and there is no fixed number of days it has to happen within, only a duty on the council to act over a timescale that is reasonable given how urgent things are. If your relative is about to leave hospital, say so: funding care after a hospital stay covers the free reablement period many councils offer first, and a carer's assessment fits naturally alongside it rather than after it. You can bring somebody with you, a friend, another relative, or a worker from a carers' organisation, and if you would struggle to take part without one, the council must arrange an independent advocate at no cost.

If what would help most is simply having somebody else do part of the caring, put that to the assessor directly rather than treating it as separate from the assessment. A carer for the parts of the week you find hardest, paid from your relative's own money or from a direct payment, is often the practical answer behind a written plan about "respite": can my mum pay me to care for her? covers paying from her own money, and you can see carers near her before you decide anything. Where a longer break is what you need, respite care sets out how a week or two away is arranged.

If the council refuses an assessment altogether, or you disagree with what it decided, the same route applies as for the person you care for: ask for the decision in writing, use the council's complaints procedure, and go to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman if that does not resolve it. Local authority funding sets out that route in full. Carers Trust runs local young carers' services across the country and is worth searching for by area, and Carers UK's helpline, 0808 808 7777, gives free advice on any of this, whatever your age.