JENNI MURRAY: Why's it still a daughter's job to care for Mum and Dad?

• Pushing up age women can claim their pension hasn't saved taxpayer any money
• Jenni Murray says daughters are still assumed to look after incapable parents
• The UK-based columnist argues need for a better care system on the state 

Surprise, surprise: a new study shows reforms that pushed up the age at which women can claim their state pension have not saved the taxpayer any money.

Why? Because women who carry on working to earn their own living (and pay tax) fail to carry out the caring responsibilities for ageing relatives that we have relied on them to do for decades. It’s a pattern of family life that has saved the state £130 billion plus every year.

According to the report by King’s College London, for every 30 hours a woman works in her 60s, it costs £5,600 to make up for the care she would otherwise have provided. And so, oh dear, far from being seen as a useful taxpayer who would contribute to any proper plan for the state to pick up the tab for care, she is perceived to cause the woeful diminution of care for the elderly and needy.

Hang on a minute! How come, in the 21st century, it is still assumed to be a daughter’s responsibility to do the hardest job of all — looking after an increasingly infirm and incapable mother or father?

Do we still live as in the 18th and early 19th centuries, when one sister in the family would remain unmarried in order to nurse older family members?

In Jane Austen’s Emma, it’s poor Miss Bates, there to care for the old Mrs Bates. And there are many more like her in literary history: women who were expected to forgo any life of their own for the benefit of others in the family.

Don’t a lot of these old people, in fiction and in fact, have perfectly competent sons as well as daughters? What is their responsibility for looking after Mum and Dad?

So many women of my generation have faced this dilemma. As an only daughter, I was lucky. I did what I could to help as Parkinson’s disease took its toll on my mother, but my devoted father did the bulk of her care, understanding that his daughter had a job and teenagers to care for.

Other women, with equally busy working lives, would exhaust themselves when their brothers failed to help, too.

My friend Joanne came to my house one afternoon on her last legs. She was divorced, running her own business, had two teenagers to support and was spending hours every week running from London to Leicester, helping her widowed mother cope with advancing dementia and trying to arrange assistance for her.

Why, I asked, didn’t her brother, who lived near their mother, do his fair share? He apparently didn’t think it was his problem.

I couldn’t help laughing after Lieutenant Commander Simon Reeves had a bit of an accident when he captained HMS Chiddingfold for the first time. He was trying to dock her in the dark and collided with HMS Penzance. Twice! It took me back to the BBC radio comedy The Navy Lark, when Jon Pertwee would yell, ‘Left hand down a bit, Mr Phillips’ as HMS Troutbridge inevitably hit the harbour wall. 

As you approach old age, as I will in the not-too-distant future, you have to think seriously about these matters. I have two sons and I have no doubt they would never shirk their responsibilities for me or their father.

When I had cancer years ago, they could not have been more attentive. On those occasions when I’ve managed to fall and break a bone they have been there to help, driving me to the hospital, visiting, helping at home when cooking and dressing myself were tough. They never held back. But it seems rare for sons to be so willing.

The new research suggests there should be more free care for old people whose family carers have jobs, or subsidies for employers to allow flexible hours for workers who have caring responsibilities.

I say, let’s provide a better care system on the state so parents don’t fear they’ll become a burden on their children. But, meanwhile, come on sons everywhere: step up and stop people assuming that elder care is women’s work. We have jobs, too, just like you.

Thanks for my £65, Rachael!

Thank you Rachael Blackmore for proving me right when I said a woman could win the Grand National. It’s the only race I ever bet on and you won me £65 — my best win since 1983, when the trainer Jenny Pitman advised me to back Corbiere. My dad used to say: ‘Don’t gamble, it’s a mug’s game.’ But I think once a year is probably OK with very small stakes! 

• Zoe Stacey, whose son William is two months old, is breastfeeding him. She has also been called for jury duty and been told she can’t defer jury service for more than a year, as it’s not an excuse not to do her civic duty.

It’s outrageous that she is expected to leave him at home with a bottle.

Here’s what I’d do. Go to court, take William with me and feed him when he needs it.

I remember seeing a woman feeding on a bus when I was little and asking my mum, ‘Has that baby got to eat all that before it gets to Sheffield?’ Everybody laughed. Nobody complained.

I was once reduced to feeding my son while out shopping in the shoe section of Marks & Spencer, the only place I could sit down.

Why all the fuss these days about a woman baring her breast for the purpose for which it was designed? Lighten up, everybody.

Plucky Bukky gets my Bafta vote this year

I think the squeal of delight in my house was as loud as the one in her sitting room when Bukky Bakray was named Rising Star at the Baftas on Sunday. She was picked from her school at the age of 16 to star in Sarah Gavron’s film Rocks, about a girl who is left to care for her little brother. She had no acting experience but was brilliant. The chubby 16-year-old is now a stunning 19-year-old with a career she could never have dreamt of. Good luck to her. 

How i’ll miss my friend Shirley

After a four-hour cut and colour on Monday, I emerged a new woman. My hair, unlike that of my friend Baroness Williams, who died on that day, has always been my pride and joy.

In 1995, we were both in Beijing to attend the UN Women’s Conference.

When I arrived at the hotel, they had no room for me. I called the producer, who had arrived earlier. ‘Don’t make a fuss,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t work here. Shirley Williams is asleep on my bed. No room for her either. I’ll sort it.’ And the hotel manager, with the unlikely name of Peter Pan, did sort it. We had dinner and went off to our own beds.

Next morning, at breakfast, my producer was worried. Her room seemed to have been searched. Shirley said the same, but my room was fine.

‘Ah,’ said Shirley, ‘I think they gave us the wrong rooms. They thought you were me. I was the dodgy journalist who needed to be checked out and, I have to say, you do look the more likely Baroness!’