Mr. Tim Duggan:

I hope two things do not get confused here. In terms of tracking, there are a couple of things. If somebody is on one of our schemes, such as carer's allowance, carer's benefit or domiciliary care allowance, we obviously have records and are able to track all of that. Second, we are setting up a register where people can record and register with us their periods of care. Where they relate to social welfare scheme claims, we will be able to correlate those but, where they do not, we will set out for people how they can support their claim for those caring periods on the register. That is how we will do a lot of the tracking.

The issue of somebody working more or less than 18.5 hours is, in one sense, a red herring because anyone who works more than three hours and a certain number of minutes a week gets a class A contribution and so their record is increasing all of the time. It only really applies where somebody is seeking to claim the long-term carer's credit, in other words, where they have been caring for an incapacitated individual for more than 20 years. It only kicks in once that 20-year threshold is met and the Department will take quite a generous view of that. Even if a person has been working during that time, as long as it was for less than 18.5 hours per week, that period will be included in the calculation for long-term carer's credit, LTCC, purposes.