People who know me will tell you I have a huge issue with the national charity Carers UK, in my opinion they are corrupt to the bone. They make a living out of helping the government of the day keep carers in poverty and misery.
The statistics they pump out to the media cannot be proven as they ‘direct’ whoever carries out their surveys so their figures are slanted or biased to come out at the highest number possible, in other words they are wrong/incorrect or just a plain and simple lie.
For the past 5 or 6 years I have been highlighting how they let carers down, not just by being inept but by being devious and aggressive in the defence of their generous salaries. Compare the fact that one of the charity employees receives between £70,000 to £80,000 a year while a carer gets Carers Allowance of £61.35 though many carer receive nothing because of the overlapping benefit rule.
When I attempted to set up a charity to oppose them and have the aim of being run BY carers 4 carers they complained long and loud, as did my stalkers. They defend what they perceive as ‘their realm’ of speaking for carers with savage conviction even though their main staff are not carers. The attempt to set up a charity was something that I hated though as I don’t consider carers as charity cases, they/we are hard workers who deserve more respect than they get.
Most carers struggle to get respite or even a single day off from their caring role, Carers UK’s employees get paid holiday leave. One of Carers UK’s members Ms Madeline Starr even gets free holidays to Australia, Canada and Helsinki- all expenses and travel paid for, well they aren’t classed as holidays they are to “discuss and compare carers’ rights and support for carers in different parts of the world”.
These visits will be entirely useless for carers in the UK, nothing will come of it for carers here. Will other countries get the benefit of Carers UK’s wisdom and expertise? God I hope not! Promoting incompetence to other countries carer support networks would be awful.
When things are getting desperate for carers and the disabled people we carers look after, when the bedroom tax, disability allowance cuts and other benefits and allowances are being cut and are driving people to commit suicide Carers UK decide it’s best to send someone all over the globe to “discuss and compare carers rights”!
I can sum up our “rights” in a five words ‘we don’t have any rights’.
Carers UK fail to tell carers just how much money some of their staff are raking in. Take Imelda Redmond their former CEO, she didn’t mention anywhere that she held a position of non-executive director of Homerton University Hospital NHS Trust which added around £10,000 to £15,000 pounds a year to her salary of over £70,000 a year as CEO of Carers UK. A woman who lives in an area of London where flats are selling for over £1,000,000 must be holding down other salaried work yet had the nerve to refuse to fight for a decent level of Carers Allowance for people who work a damn site harder than she did.
I have had countless run ins with this charity, stand up to them and you get subjected to attacks most carers would not be able to counter or stand up to. One particular incident stands out as a shining example of why Carers UK should not ever be trusted.
After a former employee/trustee/director of theirs started an online stalking campaign against my wife and I- which included making a false allegation of benefit fraud and countless false complaints to my local police force, I had Carers UK’s Gavin MacGregor phone social services and my local police force to check on my wife’s safety as they thought she might be in danger from me!
It isn’t the first time Gavin MacGregor has behaved in a way that would have had him removed from his job in any other walk of life, he was the person who helped get a strong campaigner for carers removed from her post (link = http://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/Carers-champ-ejected/story-11434416-detail/story.html) He is also the holder of a restraining order after his behaviour towards a friend of Ms Gross’s. I am not the only person who has been attacked in this way, Ms Wendy Maxwell who runs Chill4Us (link = http://chill4uscarers.co.uk/) or a good friend of mine and fellow campaigner for carers and those who claimed DLA Mr Ian Sandeman.
Naturally I complained to the charity and the Charity Commission after Mr MacGregor’s actions as did Ms Gross, but it seems if you work for a charity you can do what you want with impunity as I found out after I complained to another charity about the behaviour of a Mr Charles Huddleston who found it great sport to make fun of my wife’s cancer scare. He wasn’t sacked or sanctioned either, in fact he is now manager of CLASP The Carers Centre, or so I hear.
It has been said by Carers UK that if you don’t agree with the way it is run then you should join them and try to change things from ‘the inside’. After seeing this I stated I wanted to join them as I didn’t agree with their emphasis on staff salaries over helping carers themselves. I was refused membership because… ta-dah I “didn’t agree with their aims”. You can’t make this stuff up can you?
How about their head of technology sending out a complete list of email addresses of members and organisations they work with. Yup they did that as well, and the really pathetic thing about it is there was under 200 email addresses. For a charity that claims (falsely) that there are 6 million carers! And it was my fault they sent them out apparently.
I have always advised carers to steer clear of Carers UK because they cannot be trusted, put peoples good names at stake and- as I said, if you challenge them they then become very unprofessional and try to intimidate you. Apart from that I find it incredibly insulting for carers to be seen as charity cases, we are not, we are hard-working people providing a service to the country and saving the NHS and Social Services a fortune. But if you try to get a self-proclaimed “voice of carers” to fight for “carers” you will be branded a “dangerous person”, well that‘s what they have emailed other carers, organisations and media outlets. A national charity scared of little old me and the truth?
Hopefully they will keep in mind that until carers get a standard of living that befit’s the work and sacrifice they have to do, and until carers are allowed to speak for themselves (because Carers UK hand pick the carers they feel should be spoken too by the media, the sort of carer that does as the charity tells them), then I will continue to be “dangerous” and expose their parasitic feeding off of our lives and work, their abuse of trust and their insidious little ways to as many people as I can.
Carers deserve better
