Paid Carer’s Leave Is Finally on the Table. It’s Overdue, and It Mustn’t Be Watered Down.

11 June 2026 • By Tom Street, Solicitor

For two years now, working carers have had a legal right to take time off to look after a relative. There’s been one glaring problem with it: it’s unpaid. If you have to choose between a day’s wages and getting your mum to a hospital appointment, that “right” is not much of a right at all.

So the consultation the Government opened this week matters. It asks, finally, whether carer’s leave should be paid, whether carers should get more than the current week, and whether people who step back from work for an intensive period of caring should have a guaranteed route back. It also opens the door to “Hugh’s Law”, support for parents whose child receives a serious diagnosis. These are the right questions. My worry is what happens to the answers between now and a Bill.

What the law gives carers today

The Carer’s Leave Act 2023 came into force on 6 April 2024. It gives employees one week of unpaid leave in any rolling 12-month period to provide or arrange care for a dependant with a long-term care need. It’s a day-one right, so there’s no qualifying period, and you can take it in single days or half days rather than one solid block.

The protection around it has teeth. An employee dismissed for a reason connected to taking carer’s leave is treated as automatically unfairly dismissed, with no two-year service requirement. Carers also can’t lawfully be subjected to a detriment, a demotion, a withdrawn promotion, that sort of thing, for using the entitlement.

What the law does not do is pay you. That single fact is why take-up has been patchy. The Carer’s Leave Act was a genuine step forward, but it asked carers to absorb the cost of caring themselves, on top of everything else they’re already absorbing.

What’s actually being proposed

The consultation, run jointly by the Department for Business and Trade and the Department of Health and Social Care, puts three things on the table for unpaid carers.

First, paid carer’s leave. The Government is asking how long a paid period should be and at what rate it should be paid. This is the headline, and it’s the one that would make the biggest practical difference.

Second, more unpaid days. The current five-day entitlement could be extended, with the consultation seeking views on how many additional days would be sensible.

Third, a “right to return”. This would be a new statutory protection modelled on maternity leave, safeguarding someone’s job during a longer absence for an intensive period of caring. At the moment, a carer who needs months away has nothing comparable to the job protection a new parent gets.

Alongside all of this sits “Hugh’s Law”, named after Hugh Menai-Davis, who died aged six from cancer in 2021. His family and their charity, It’s Never You, have campaigned for paid leave and financial support for parents in the brutal first weeks and months after a child’s serious diagnosis. The consultation asks how that kind of support should work.

This builds on a pattern, not a one-off

It’s worth seeing this in context. Family-friendly rights have been moving in one direction for a while. The Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act 2023 gave parents of babies in neonatal care a new entitlement to leave and pay from 6 April 2025. The Employment Rights Act 2025 has pushed a swathe of protections to day one. Paid carer’s leave would be the logical next piece of that puzzle.

The economic argument is not soft either. Around 3 million people are trying to hold down a job while caring for someone, and the cost of them being forced to cut hours or quit altogether runs to something like £37 billion a year in lost output. Employers like TSB, which already offers its staff 70 hours of paid carer’s leave a year, have worked out that keeping experienced people in post beats losing them. Carers UK has long made the same case.

Where I’d urge caution

A consultation is not a law. There’s a long road between “we’re seeking views” and a carer actually being paid for a day off, and that road is where good intentions tend to get trimmed. The questions that decide whether this works are the boring ones: how many paid days, paid at what rate, and how the right to return is policed.

If paid carer’s leave is set at a token flat rate, the way much family pay is, it will help, but it won’t solve the problem for lower-paid carers who lose the most in real terms. If the right to return comes without a real remedy when an employer ignores it, it becomes another line in a handbook that no one enforces. And the timing matters. The consultation closes on 1 September 2026, and legislation, if it comes, will take longer still. Carers need this in years, not decades.