 As you might have heard from the introduction, I'm fairly new to this grey world of social science. I like to say that I came from the bridge in between pure science and now moved into social science, which is more, as I said, the grey area where nothing is quite right, nothing is quite wrong. There's so many different aspects to one single question so you can get great debates and get great arguments about all and nothing really. I'm in the Department of Geontology, and this is a little bit embarrassing. I've been in Geontology for about two years, and I always get the question, so what's Geontology? And I'll kind of just go, yeah, it's a study of aging. And I decided about two months ago, only two months ago, to look up what Geontology means. You would think that I looked up this about two years ago before I entered into Geontology, but no, apparently our PhD students aren't as clever as we might look. Anyway, Geontology is, I'm going to have to read this out because it's a bit of a mouthful, Geontology is the study of social, cultural, psychological, cognitive, biological aspect of aging. So basically, it's everything that's got to do with the fact of what happens to us as we get older and as we age. My PhD, Richard, looks into the pathways of informal care. And the reason why I chose this topic is that I grew up having an older aunt, who spent most of my living memory looking after her disabled son. So I saw how it affected her life choices and sort of her life in January, and it wasn't just negative aspects as you quite often hear. There was a lot of joy and there was a lot of positivity. Every year we got to go on a special trip to Legoland. That was the highlight of my year because I got to go over them and it was free. So that's fun. So before I start really going into my research, I don't have a watch on me because I don't want to do this, but it's past nine o'clock. We're in a pub. I thought I would turn this into a drinking game. Every time I say care, you have to take a sip of your drink. I also decided that this is a really bad idea because in my talk, I will say care every other sentence. So you would end up getting very, very drunk. But I'll make you a deal. If I start using very fancy, smancy, pentsy words or a lot of jargon, please feel free to shout at me and I will do the drinking then. So, why is research into informal care important? Well, just to clarify, when I'm talking about informal care and informal carers, I'm referring to people or individuals who are providing care for somebody without being paid. So the formal definition is people who look after, people who support family or potential friends. And it can be people who look after a relative, a friend who is in need because of all these physical or learning disabilities or illness or mental health. It can also be substance misuse problems. But the important part of this whole thing is that they are unpaid and it's not part of any volunteering scheme either. So the tasks that informal carers are carrying out can be anything from practical tasks or household chores. It can also be help with arranging more formal care or help managing finances. But it can also be in the other end of the scale where it can be personal care. So it could be help with showering, bathing, toileting, feeding, dispensing medicine, et cetera. So the term informal has quite often been criticised. And it's been criticised because it could be seen as misleading in a way because it doesn't really fully incorporate the magnitude and the determination and the dedication and the scale of commitment that the carers are providing and the tasks that they're actually carrying out. But these carers are exceptionally important to ensure that the people that I need of care get to have support and get to still have a really good quality of life. So informed care is also very important because there's actually about 7 million unpaid carers in the UK. That's about 1 in 10 of the population in the UK that are providing some kind of informal care. It's also been estimated that about 3 in 5 of us at any time in our life will end up providing care for somebody at some form. So it's becoming an increasingly shared experience for us all. So these figures I've just given incorporate all carers of all age ranges. So it also includes younger carers and I tend to look more at the older end of the scale. So over 65 it's estimated that 3 in 5 are informal carers. So that's quite a lot. So you can see this sort of bigger proportion are the older carers. That's a lot of numbers. Let's move on from statistical numbers to talk about money. So what's this all worth? So it's been estimated that and that's estimation is from carers UK that the value of informal care is saving the UK government whopping £132 billion. That was from 2015. That's actually the equivalent of a whole healthcare system on its own. So we're talking really big bucks here. Also this number is potentially really underestimated. We know there's a lot of hidden care so it's not being calculated into this. We also kind of how do you put a value on care? How do you put a value on providing emotional care for instance? And now we're sort of sticking with this money and I'm going to do some business lingo because that's completely not my field and I'd like to just do that jargon. So it's a prime demand. Chancellor was already saying that the population in the UK is aging and worth a lot more older people. So you would think, I've just kind of said that a lot of carers are older as well. So wouldn't that just mean that hey the supply is going up? We've got loads of carers. Should we really then worry? Yes we should because the demand at the same time is also going up. So again Johannes was talking about the disability free life expectancy. It's not actually catching up with the life expectancy so the gap is growing. And that means that this health, this supply and demand balance is not balancing out, is widening. So we need more carers.