Editor

I have been listening to all the praise that our front-line workers and key workers are getting at the moment, and rightly so.

These people are putting themselves and their families at risk every day to the point where a huge number have lost their lives to save others - so their efforts should not go unnoticed.

There is a sector that has gone unnoticed and have done for many years and they are people like myself. I have given up my job, future and social life to look after my father, who is now 92, after my mother passed away some five years.

Looking after my disabled father is a full-time job working most weeks around 100 hours, but I would not give this up for the world because he is my father and I owe him everything.

He started work at the age of 14 by going down the pits and since then has given the country so much, far too much to list and the very least I can do is now look after him in his old age.

The government has deliberately overlooked people like myself who look after a loved one full or part time. Even in this lockdown we are still overlooked. The government have put people like myself into poverty by only giving home carers £67 a week, which for me and many millions of others only works out to around 67p per hour, who in this day and age would ever work for that.

That is why I have set up a petition with the backing of Catherine Hughes (county councillor), Ben Lake MP for Ceredigion and the Ceredigion County Council carers unit. You can read more about this in petition at: change.org - search ‘get carers out of poverty’.

I am looking for support for this petition so that we can all be fair and get carers out of poverty once and for all.

David Jones, Maescrugiau, Pencader

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