More than 100 young carers in Wokingham borough do not receive financial support from the council.

An investigation by the News found there are 111 young people under the age of 18 who care for a friend or family member in the borough who do not qualify to receive grants.

Cllr Parry Batth, executive member for health and wellbeing, adult social care and housing, at Wokingham Borough Council (WBC) said: “Sadly, we can only approve financial support to applications meeting the eligibility criteria set out in the Care Act (2014).

“For example, we cannot help carers already paid to care for someone, or those only doing a certain task such as a social telephone call, or cases where the person being supported doesn’t qualify for care under the legislation.”

The council spent £86,000 on supporting carers aged over 18 between 2015-2017.

But if a young carer is in full-time work or in education, they may not be entitled to support from their local authority.

However, if they are over 16 years old and are supporting an adult for at least 35 hours a week they may qualify for Universal Credit payments.

And Nicola Strudley, Healthwatch Wokingham Borough (HWB) representative, said that young carers were also getting turned away from GP surgeries in the area for flu jabs because they did not meet legislation requirements.

She told The News: “This needs to change as because we need to do everything we can to support our young carers.”

The HWB representative claimed that 10 per cent of all young people have caring responsibilities, but the council claims it is aware of less than 700 young carers aged between 7 and 25 years old supporting a relative in the borough.

Nationwide, there are more than 700,000 known young carers and one in three of them spend between 11-20 hours caring. The average age of a young carer is just twelve years old.

The council and Healthwatch Wokingham Borough are helping to raise awareness of young carers for young carers awareness day today (Thursday, January 31).

A number of events have already taken place in the town centre in recent days in order to start conversations about the impact caring can have on young people’s mental health.

Nicola Strudley told The News: “Young people lose their childhood in order to take on a lot of responsibility. As a result, this creates an awful lot of pressure and can lead to depression and stress.

“If an adult has a mental health problem it usually starts in their teenage years so if they go on caring there is a probability this could apply to them. It is so important that they have support with them.

“Young carers love the people they care for but they hate the fact they have to do the tough bit.

“It is a balancing act.”

Some of the borough’s young carers were out in Wokingham with the young carers’ team from Saturday, January 26 and Tuesday, January 29.

Healthwatch Wokingham Borough will also be raising awareness of young carers’ work today and on Friday, February 1 at the council’s Shute End offices.

The group has organised a game in which residents can come along to the offices and spin a wheel, which will stop on an aspect of the young carers lives they have to ‘drop’ as result of their caring duties.

This could range from missing out on meeting friends, a deterioration of their health, not being able to do exercise and much more.

Councillor Pauline Helliar-Symons, executive member for children’s services, said: “So many of our residents in the Wokingham Borough are carers in some form or another.

“Caring for anyone, at any age, is hard work, but for young carers it can be particularly tough to carry such responsibility at such a young age. Our Young Carers team provide invaluable emotional and practical support to these carers when they need it most.

“Young Carers Awareness Day is great opportunity for residents to learn more about young carers and the contribution they make to our Borough.”