European Parliament calls for stronger family dimension EU Disability rights Strategy
The European Parliament has adopted a report on the EU Disability Strategy post-2025. The text was adopted on 27 November 2025.
In this report there is a specific chapter on families, which was not present in the initial proposal. This is a very positive sign for COFACE Disability and the broader COFACE network.
The report mentions:
- the need to fully implement the EU work-life balance directive to the benefit of carers;
- calls on the ESF+ to be used to boost the effective implementation of the European care strategy in all Member States
- highlights the urgent need to ensure that families and informal carers are supported through access to high-quality respite care services;
- the need to provide psychological and emotional support to families and informal carers, including counselling and peer support programmes;
- support the transition from informal care roles to formal employment for family caregivers;
- calls on the Commission to swiftly present the announced European Care Deal, recognising long-term care as a social responsibility rather than a private one;
- reasonable accommodation in education is mentioned several times in the report;
- calls for the European Child Guarantee to be provided with an ambitious budget.
COFACE’s call for more data was also heard as the report “(…) calls on the Commission to collect and publish integrated and disaggregated data on families with dependent children with disabilities, including variables such as household composition, per capita income, officially recognised degree of disability and publicly supported dependency related expenditure, in order to be able to develop more targeted support measures”.
On the negative side, parents with disabilities were not referred to in the report.
You can read the full report here more here
