THERE are more than six million carers in the UK, doing an amazing job after finding themselves in the position of caring for someone who may be older, disabled or seriously ill.

Whether your caring role comes as a surprise or whether the needs of the person you care for have changed, carers often have to pick up the household’s financial management at little notice. This is hard enough, but without a paper trail, it is nigh on impossible.

Until relatively recently someone taking on a caring role could run somebody else’s finances pretty straightforwardly, with the appropriate authorisations. Even if you were caring for someone whose filing system wasn’t up to scratch, you could gauge the state of accounts pretty clearly from the regular paperwork that companies were sending out.

But the last decade has seen a wholesale change in how service providers communicate. Banks have relentlessly advocated switching people to online accounts, sometimes automatically. Energy companies lure people in with the promise of lower bills if they don’t have to send out a paper copy.

When you’re caring for someone, the last thing you need is additional complications - or worse, the thought of having services cut off if you don’t pay the bill that you now can’t readily access. Nobody wants to be quizzing a frail or sick dependent about their passwords and service providers.

The Keep Me Posted campaign, which is supported by Carers UK, wants everyone to have the choice to receive bills and statements on paper if that’s what they prefer. As Carers Week marks the excellent, usually unseen and unsung work, that carers provide, surely giving people that choice is something that makes sense.

Judith Donovan CBE

Chairman

Keep Me Posted