COFACE-Handicap acts to promote the availability of sufficient, appropriate care provision and services, close-to-home and home help services for people in need of care in all Member States. COFACE-Handicap wants resources, assistance and provision harmonized within the EU to avoid the disparities which would deny freedom of movement to families with care-needers.

Key aims

• COFACE-Handicap strongly believes in the need for people with a disability to develop as a whole person within their family, and seeing that their disability and already vulnerable social situation is not made worse.
• COFACE-Handicap works to promote a tax policy which is favourable to family carers by making allowance for the costs of caring for someone with a disability.
• COFACE-Handicap campaigns for all EU countries to implement a real policy to increase the number and quality of jobs, within the subsidiarity principle, in which all working parents, within their abilities, would have access to responsible, decently-paid jobs in order to forestall any risk of exclusion and poverty.
• COFACE-Handicap defends the rights of individual and family carers looking after care-needers whose disability is too severe to enable them ever to work, even if offered appropriate employment.

Priorities

• Splittable parental leave to accommodate the needs of a family providing constant care to a care-needer in the household.
• The wages for such leave periods paid out of social insurance.
• Because of the constant high levels of stress created by caring for people with complex dependency needs, negotiable early retirement opportunities in splittable periods of time after a minimum period of caring.
• Close-to-home workplaces and flexible working hours.
• Dismissal to be unlawful on any grounds other than dereliction of duty.
• Free movement within the EU with preservation of rights to the highest levels of benefit payments.
• The right to a career and advancement.
• EU-level harmonization and convergence to improve services to help achieve the work-care balance.