Petition Improve the rules for unpaid work and carer's allowance.

It is highly unusual that you cannot claim Job Seeker's allowance if you are doing more than 16 hours per week of unpaid work.

Yet at the same time you cannot claim carer's allowance unless you do 35 hours or more per week.

This means someone could be checking up on an elderly person, giving them medication etc, for an hour 4 times a day, that is still only 28 hours, meanwhile a paid NHS home carer might attend for half an hour 3 times a day and is on £8.70 per hour or more! Even then they cannot administer medication unless specially trained!

It needs a new benefit that covers specifically unpaid charity work for the elderly for more than 28 hours a week, (that is 4 hours a day 7 days a week, or 8 hours for 4 days) which works in conjuction with JSA, maybe even disclosing what hours the person does!.