GeroStats

Unpaid care across Tyne and Wear

The hidden week being carried in plain sight.

Across Newcastle, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and Sunderland, Census 2021 shows 24,107 people aged 65 and over providing unpaid care across Tyne and Wear. On a cautious lower-bound count, that is at least 726,492 care-hours every week. It is older people getting someone washed, dressed, fed, medicated, watched over, taken to appointments, settled at night, and held together again the next day.

Some places are not just poorer. They are doing more care, with less money, poorer health, and less margin for anything to go wrong.

At least 726,492 unpaid care-hours every week from 24,107 carers aged 65 and over Census 2021 RM113, Tyne and Wear LSOAs aggregated to wards

The map

Older carers are carrying a hidden week.

Start with the animated walkthrough, then use the map to explore the named areas yourself. The map is built from small-area Census data and read through named wards. Colour shows minimum unpaid care-hours provided by people aged 65 and over, per 100 residents aged 65 and over.

Animated walkthrough

Watch the week accumulate.

This guided animation steps through the care clock, the Deckham small-area spike, the named-ward ranking, full-time-plus care, and the precarious pattern where older unpaid care, deprivation, poor health and disability sit together.

726,492 minimum unpaid care-hours provided by people aged 65+ every week
12,776 people aged 65+ report 50+ hours of unpaid care a week
D3.0 average deprivation decile in the highest older-care burden fifth of wards
8.7% average bad or very bad health in that highest older-care burden fifth

This counts people aged 65 and over who provide unpaid care. It does not identify the age or relationship of the person receiving that care.

Interactive map

Older unpaid care across Tyne and Wear

Colour shows the lower-bound weekly care-hours provided by residents aged 65 and over. Switch the view to deprivation, full-time-plus care or the intersectional signal.

Colour shows the lower-bound weekly care-hours from older carers.

Start point

Tyne and Wear Ward-level view
Care burden
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Older carers
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Health
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Deprivation
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The hidden week

726,492 minimum unpaid care-hours every week.

This is the minimum visible week of unpaid care provided by 24,107 people aged 65 and over across Tyne and Wear.

Use the controls or hover the map to take over.

What this shows

Unpaid care is not evenly shared.

The map is not saying that care is a problem. Care is love, duty, reciprocity, family, friendship and survival. The issue is intersectionality: older age, unpaid care, poor health, disability and deprivation are not separate lines on a table. In some wards, they intersect in the same lives and streets.

In the most deprived fifth of local neighbourhoods here, the minimum older-carer burden is about 418 hours per 100 residents aged 65 and over each week. In the lowest older-care burden fifth, it is about 246 hours. That is not a small difference in a week. It is a different social load.

Denton & Westerhope makes this personal.

Denton & Westerhope is where I grew up, so it should not disappear behind a top-five ranking. It is not the highest ward by rate per 100 residents aged 65 and over, but it carries a very large amount of the hidden week: at least 10,320 unpaid care-hours from older residents every week.

In this map it ranks second across Tyne and Wear for total older-care hours, and second for the number of residents aged 65 and over reporting 50 or more hours of unpaid care a week. That is the point of making the map personal: the places that formed us can also be places where public statistics become harder to keep at a distance.

Imagine if this stopped tomorrow.

Thousands of older people are doing work the formal care system would otherwise have to see, fund and staff. If that unpaid labour stopped tomorrow, the pressure would not disappear. It would move into GP surgeries, hospitals, social care waiting lists, family finances and the health of the carers themselves.

That is the take-home: when older carers are also in poorer, more disabled and more deprived places, resilience is not an endless resource. It is infrastructure, even when it happens in kitchens, bedrooms, buses, clinics, pharmacies and broken sleep.

Take-home

If the hidden labour stopped.

The policy question is not only how many hours are being provided. It is who is providing them, where, and with what margin left. If older unpaid carers in high-burden places became too ill, too poor, or too exhausted to continue, the hidden week would become a visible service crisis very quickly.

Read the technical note

Sources

Author

Andrew Kingston

I am a statistical epidemiologist from the North East. GeroStats is where I can write personally about public health statistics, local places and the hidden labour that official numbers can make visible.

drandrewkingston@gmail.com