Care Homes: England

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Anne Main in the Chair]

14:30

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered care homes in England.

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. It is the second time I have done so; the first was on my first Bill Committee, and this is now my first Westminster Hall debate, so I seem to be following you around the corridors of the House of Commons.

I take pride in the fact that my first Westminster Hall debate is on the care that we as a society provide for older generations. Care homes are an essential part of our social care network, providing support and residential care for more than 400,000 older people. We must reassure older people, families, carers and society at large that we are a country that will continue to offer sustainable, quality, statutorily supported care in what is about to become an extremely difficult funding climate for them.

This is not the first time that I have raised this topic; the Minister will be familiar with the many parliamentary questions I have tabled on the subject. As he is personally dedicated to quality care for older people, I know that he will welcome the opportunity to discuss this matter in more detail than would often be the case for a humble Back Bencher such as me going through the normal channels of parliamentary protocol.

In many ways, it is strange that we need to have this debate at all. With an ageing population and estimates that the number of people aged 85 and over is set to double over the next 30 years, people would think that having a well-funded and secure network of homes to provide care for later in life would be a given. This is the 21st century after all, and we meet in a Parliament of one of the world’s largest economies—an economy that was built through the graft and ingenuity of the wartime generation, our security delivered through their sacrifice.

However, evidence and testimony from care providers points to a sector in a perilous state, primarily for two reasons. First, a significant amount of the funding for older people in residential care who lack independent means comes from local authorities, so the significant cuts in local council funding have led to a 17% reduction in real terms in local authority spending on adult social care for older people since 2009-10.

[Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)]

I recently took part in a conference organised by the GMB trade union along with carers and people who run care homes. Those who run care homes expressed specific concerns about the fact that they were aware of people—and particularly older people—sometimes being kept in hospital when there was no real medical need for them to be. If we compare the costs, it costs a couple of hundred pounds a day for them to be staying in hospital—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. The hon. Lady’s intervention is becoming a speech.

[Paula Sherriff]

Okay. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should speed up the transitional process and put pathways in place, so that the move between hospital and care homes can happen much more efficiently?

[Peter Kyle]

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for raising an incredibly important point, and I know well from conversations that we have had both in the Chamber and outside it how much she advocates for her constituents who are in care homes. The fact is that the so-called bed-blocking problem is often caused not by a lack of beds, but by a lack of capacity out in communities, for various reasons. One of those involves communities and the care home sector itself. The fact that people are ending up in hospitals is indicative of the much broader problem of caring for people where they need to be cared for most, which is in their homes and communities. My hon. Friend makes that point very well.

The significant cuts to local council funding have led to a 17% reduction in real terms for local authority spending. Industry research cited by ResPublica points to a shortfall between the cost and provision of the average weekly fee paid by local authorities, which worked out as £42 per resident per week in the period between October 2014 to September 2015.

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

As the hon. Gentleman may know, I have been a great champion of care homes and the need to meet the challenges over many years. Does he at least, despite being absolutely right to raise these problems, feel some comfort from the 2% precept? I understand that many of the county councils are going to take up that precept, which has been introduced to alleviate some of the challenges that he alludes to.

[Peter Kyle]

I am very grateful for that intervention. I will come to the precept in a moment, when I would welcome further interventions as we talk about the detail of the precept and how it actually, while being welcome on a surface level, will be rolled out in different ways and impact on communities differently. I will keep my eyes open, as the hon. Lady might well want to come back to this when we tackle those issues.

The pressures on care providers will only be exacerbated by the increases in the minimum wage that will come in from this April. However, let me restate my position on the rising minimum wage for the avoidance of any doubt: I believe that those working in the caring professions deserve a pay rise for the fantastic jobs that they do, especially considering that it has sadly become a low-pay sector. I am glad that there is now cross-party consensus on the ambitious rise that is deserved by all those on low pay. However, we must make this work, and it will only work if we are aware of and prepare for what will happen in the areas that this will impact on hardest.

The National Care Association, for example, has estimated that the rise will add at least 5% to payrolls this year and a further 7% year on year by 2020. Without extra resources, local authorities will end up pushing independent, statutorily funded care homes closer to the brink. The excellent ResPublica report from November laid bare the startling and shocking fact that an unfunded living wage could end up with the loss of 37,000 care home places. I know that the Minister and his colleagues will point to two actions that they think will mitigate that, so let me address both of those in turn.

First, there is the social care precept. Introduced in the autumn statement, it gives local authorities the power to raise council tax by an additional 2%, the proceeds of which are ring-fenced for social care. Although all additional funds are welcome, that is a drop in the ocean compared with the additional resources needed. Following the autumn statement, the King’s Fund estimated that the funding gap for social care could be as high as £3.5 billion by the end of this Parliament.

What is more, the precept may well end up generating extra revenue where it is least needed. At present, residential care home funding is split between people who pay for their care themselves and those who have it paid for by their local authority. Self-funders pay 50% more than those funded by councils so, in effect, they subsidise those paid for by the public purse. It is not hard to work out that the homes with a smaller number of self-funders are the ones who are most at risk financially from the cut in funding rates from local authorities. The split varies across the country, but on the estimated figures put together by LaingBuisson in its “Care of Older People UK Market Report”, the number of self-funders in 2014 was only 18% in the north-east, with the majority of other regions hovering around the 40% mark. It is pretty obvious that the power to raise council tax will generate the most revenue in the areas with a higher council tax base, namely the southern regions of England, which—you guessed it—have a higher number of self-funders.

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend share my opinion that council tax can be a regressive tax, and that for areas such as mine, which have levels of deprivation and are already hit by a tax that is not particularly fair, this precept is not a progressive tax? Those areas that have already been hit hardest by cuts in local government funding will be hit yet again by this tax.

[Peter Kyle]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. In representing Redcar, she knows better than anyone that people in residential care homes that are heavily reliant on statutory funding will be hit the most because of the cuts that are going into local authorities, and they will be hit again by the precept, which, because of the process that I have just outlined, will be front-loading resources into the areas that need it least. Her area of the country will have people who are more dependent on statutory funding for care home places. The 2% is based on a lower percentage of people paying council tax in the first place and will have to cover more people. That is why the precept is not fair and will not get to the people who need it most.

[Anne Marie Morris]

The hon. Gentleman is being incredibly generous with his time. He raised a point about inequality. Does he agree that we should be asking the Care Quality Commission to look at how much funding is being supplied in each county to each home? At the moment, it seems that it is a bit of a lottery, for all sorts of reasons, which may or may not be part of his argument. At the very least, we should agree the standard of care and it should be equal across the country.

[Peter Kyle]

I will always be generous with my time for the hon. Lady because, early in this debate, we have found common ground. Later in my speech, I will call for assessment of exactly those areas. We need to understand how the funding changes and the new mechanisms are impacting on the ground and geographically across the country. We must make sure that any revenues generated, particularly in these times of restraint, are going to the parts of the country that need it most. My hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) made the point well from the Opposition Benches. In this case, the support promised by the Government will simply not end up where it is needed most.

Secondly, on the better care fund, Ministers have belatedly recognised some of the flaws in simply relying on a precept to generate the extra funds needed for social care. There is simply not enough revenue being generated in poorer areas. The Government have said they will take that into account and use a formula for allocating extra funds for these areas taken from the better care fund. That was announced less than a month ago and we wait to see exactly how the details will operate in practice. There are murky areas and a lot of detail is coming. We must make sure we know exactly how this will impact providers in the front line.

Care England, a leading representative body for the independent care services, has already voiced its concern. It doubts whether the funding will get to the care homes that need it most. It is more likely that it will be used on other unfunded projects across the social care budget. It is worth remembering that the initial funding for the better care fund was not new money; it was funding to assist health services which was re-allocated to local authorities. I want to give the Minister the opportunity today to confirm whether the £1.5 billion is new money, or is again taken from existing health service budgets.

Local authorities will not see any of this money, whether new or recycled, until 2017-18 and even then it will be only £105 million. It could be too little, too late to prevent parts of our care home sector catering for the most vulnerable people in our society collapsing or withdrawing from the market and focusing on self-funding residents. Initial better care fund plans have been signed off by local authorities and NHS England. It would be great if an evaluation was conducted into how the funding to date has helped to support residential care homes, if at all.

I think the Minister can now see that there is cross-party support for this kind of independent evaluation into how funding mechanisms are impacting on front-line care provision. It could act as a best practice guide for authorities going forward, even when the extra resources the Government referred to become available. Will the Minister commit to this evaluation covering the impact of funding on the sector? Both Government and Opposition Members would find that helpful.

The majority of media coverage of the sector has been about the state of big providers, such as Four Seasons Health Care and HC-One, and speculation about their future viability. It is important to realise that the 10 largest providers account for about only 25% of the market, the rest being much smaller, independent providers. In my constituency there is a small family home, Wilbury rest home. Last year I sat down with the owner, Graham Dean, shortly after the Chancellor’s announcement on the living wage. Graham is the second generation of his family to run the home and, remarkably, he was born in it. Listening to him and other local independent care home managers talking with kindness, compassion and outright professionalism about the people they care for day in and day out has left a deep impression on me. They provide the kind of loving, caring environment that every human being deserves into their old age.

There are countless homes like that dotted around the country, but they are being pushed to the limit. Indeed, a survey from the National Care Association shows that almost a quarter of providers could exit the market altogether. That would be a tragedy for residents and society, and a crisis for the Government.

Another issue that is putting pressure on the sector is the national shortage of nurses, which has resulted in the increased use of agency nurses. In some cases that costs double the amount for permanent staff. To the Government’s credit, they have recognised that there is an issue and have been working with the care sector and with the Government’s skills body to develop a new training scheme to create a career ladder into caring professions. Sadly, that project was axed last December, just weeks before it was due to be launched. I understand from written answers that I have received that that was not a decision taken by the Department of Health. As a member of the Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills, I am happy to take up this cause with the relevant Ministers in that Department if the Minister feels that would be helpful. I would like to aid his work and I hope that his officials have already been doing much work behind the scenes to fight for its reinstatement.

As I move to my closing remarks, I would appreciate some reassurance from the Minister that the Government have a plan—dare I say it, a plan B—that is ready to be implemented should the worst-case scenario predicted by ResPublica and other respected think-tanks in the health sector come to pass. Do the Government have in place a robust contingency plan should the statutorily funded care home sector collapse, resulting in the nightmare scenario of 37,000 older people becoming homeless?

When Southern Cross Healthcare went bust in 2011, there were just enough resources from other providers in the sector to take over. Due to the current state of the industry, no private provider has the capacity to respond to a shortfall of 37,000 beds.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. He is outlining the scenario that might lie ahead if the Government do not increase their intervention. Does he agree that, for the first time in history, the UK is reaching a stage where, in addition to senior citizens being dependent on care they receive in care homes, some of their sons and daughters are of such an age that they, too, are senior citizens, so the level of dependence is even greater?

[Peter Kyle]

I am extremely grateful for that intervention. I had not considered that and I will take it on board. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for pointing it out and putting it on the record.

It may not be a Southern Cross that fails first. In fact, it is most likely to be the smaller, independent providers in areas that are most dependent on local authority placements. Can the Minister reassure us that his Department and local government have the capacity to respond to any piecemeal closures that are likely to occur?

[The Minister for Community and Social Care (Alistair Burt)]

indicated assent.

[Peter Kyle]

The Minister is nodding and I look forward to testing the argument in his statement.

Everyone here wants to ensure dignity for all later in life. That can be assured only if there is a properly resourced residential care sector with stability and financial security. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and receiving reassurances that all Members, of whatever party, want to hear, and I look forward to being able to work with him and care home providers in the months and years ahead to ensure that that type of residential care sector becomes a reality.

Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair): I shall call the Scottish National party’s Front-Bench spokesman at 3.30 and then the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman and the Minister. Quite a few hon. Members want to catch my eye and if they divvy up the time between them that will be helpful.

14:49

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I thank the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle), one of my constituency neighbours, for securing the debate and permitting me to consider the role that care homes play in my constituency.

Some 27,000 of my constituents are aged over 65 years. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the ResPublica article, which states that by 2050 the proportion of people in the UK aged 65-plus will have risen to 25%. In my constituency it is already at 28%, against a national and regional average of 17%. Indeed, Bexhill and Battle has the fifth highest proportion of people over 65 years old in the UK.

As a result, many of my constituents live or work in care homes. Before and since my election, I have visited many of those care homes and been hugely impressed by the levels of care and devotion afforded to that most special group of constituents. It is therefore right today to celebrate the role that care homes play in our country and to say thank you.

There is an unfortunate perception of care homes, which regular visitors such as myself try hard to dispel. Although many people feel negatively towards hospitals, they are considered to be places where improvements in outcomes are possible. The same is not often said of care homes. The perception is of a place that people move to when their lives have deteriorated and will continue to deteriorate. That perception means that the public rarely hear about the improvements in outcomes that care homes deliver, the innovative treatment that residents are afforded and the compassionate care that owners and their staff deliver to residents. I hope that we can use this debate to celebrate what care homes do for our constituents.

However, it is right to highlight some key challenges for care home providers, and I shall list two that require the support of the House and the Government. The first, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned, is local authority funding. The gap between local authority care home fees and the cost of care home places in real terms continues to grow. That has represented a drop of almost 5% for council-funded residents over the past five years. That situation could be exacerbated by the welcome announcement of the Government’s new living wage, which will give care home staff a wage of £9 an hour by 2020. I was glad to hear the hon. Gentleman celebrate that pay rise for hard-working care home staff, who, as he mentioned, have been underpaid for many years.

Many of my local care home providers have approached me with concerns that they may have to cease operating if margins continue to be squeezed. On their behalf I have lobbied Ministers to highlight the funding gap, and I am pleased that the Government have now given local authorities the right to add a 2% council tax surcharge for adult social care. In East Sussex, local authorities and the NHS are delivering our “Better Together” integrated healthcare programme. Although I continue to lobby for lower taxes for my constituents, I hope that they will embrace that new tax levy as a means to support the funding of care for our elderly community. I therefore hope that the gap will be plugged, at least in part. It will be interesting to hear the responses of my right hon. Friend the Minister to the other questions that the hon. Gentleman asked.

I would like to touch on staff recruitment. In the care home sector, the staff turnover rate is 32%, which is incredibly high. It is clear that the sector has issues in recruiting and retaining staff. Reliance on staff recruitment from abroad is very strong. I am delighted that the Government have added care home nurses to the shortage occupation list, albeit temporarily. Those who criticise net increases in immigration to the UK need to understand that our population is getting older and needs more care, which means more carers. I welcome the desire of the care home industry to win more contracts from our clinical commissioning funders, because I hope that that will make jobs in care homes more fulfilling, skilled and desirable. I also hope that it will allow us to rely less on staff coming from abroad—from countries that are underdeveloped and whose own residents may need care and assistance even more than people in this country do.

I will conclude, to allow other hon. Members to speak. I welcome the debate, and I celebrate the role that care homes play in this country. I have visited care homes where dementia sufferers are taken on incredible journeys back to their childhoods, where schoolchildren are invited in to go through their exercise books with residents, where residents play games and sing and where there is a great celebration of the rich lives that they have experienced and will continue to experience. I look forward to visiting more care homes and championing their owners, staff and residents in the years to come.

14:54

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman). I echo what he said about some of the excellent care that we see in care homes.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) on securing an important and timely debate. He highlighted many of the key concerns of care providers in the UK. One is the current funding crisis in social care. Over the past five years we have seen social care budgets across the country cut by almost 11%. In Enfield, the local authority has had to deliver net savings in its adult social care budget of 16% over the past four years, and by 2019, the savings requirement that the council will need to initiate will further reduce the budget by £19.8 million, from £80.8 million this year to £61 million. That is equivalent to another 25% reduction in the net budget. How do the Government seriously expect local authorities such as Enfield to cope with a cut of that level?

[Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)]

I have been a councillor, so I know that budgets have been quite tight in local authorities over the years. A care home in my constituency, Siegen Manor, is possibly due to close. Does the right hon. Lady agree that we need to look at the way councils spend money? In my new city council, there is a lot of wastage. We need to look at how councils spend their money, because I could give a lot of examples of how they could—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I call Joan Ryan.

[Joan Ryan]

It is always important that we have a weather eye on how any public authority is spending its money and that we get the best value for money; that goes without saying. However, I think—I do not believe the hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns) was disagreeing with me on this—that we need to hear from the Government how local authorities can be expected to cope with the size of cut that has been happening and is continuing to come their way. I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention.

Spending reductions of the size that my local authority is facing will almost inevitably result in cuts to the services that Enfield delivers to some of the most vulnerable people in the borough. Given the huge pressures on shrinking resources, I commend Enfield Council for its nationally recognised standards of best practice and the gold accreditation that it has received for its safeguarding work. Enfield has a wide range of care homes, which provide support to older and disabled people not only from the local area but from other areas. However, the deep cuts from central Government have already seen care homes close, and a significant increase in the number of people placed in the borough by other councils has meant that nursing home provision, particularly for people with dementia, is under severe strain. As a result, an ever increasing burden has been placed on our local NHS services and family carers. In those circumstances, it can be no great surprise that there is difficulty in recruiting and retaining staff to work as care providers.

Front-line care workers are all too often grossly undervalued. They offer vital support to people with ever more complex conditions, yet in return they often receive very poor wages. So although I welcome the introduction of the national living wage of £7.20 from April 2016, that figure is nowhere near the current London living wage of £9.40. Many care workers working in Enfield and elsewhere in London need that hourly rate just to get by. However, the Government have yet to explain how the care sector will be able to cope with the increased pressures on payrolls when funding has been so drastically cut. It is estimated that the introduction of the national living wage will add at least 5% to payrolls from 2016-17 and a further 7% every year until 2020. That will drive even more front-line care providers out of business and make a bad situation even worse.

I would like to draw to the Minister’s attention a letter I received from the Enfield Carers Centre in August last year. It read:

“Dear Joan Ryan

I am writing to you on behalf of Enfield Carers Centre to ask if you will support us in an urgent call that we are issuing to the Chancellor George Osborne in advance of the 2015 Spending Review.

In the Summer Budget, the Chancellor announced that, as of 2016, there will be a new compulsory National Living Wage of £7.20 per hour. We welcome support for care workers who deserve decent pay. However since we are dependent on local authorities paying us enough to pass this on to our valued care workers this increase therefore has to be reflected in the hourly rate paid by local authorities for care and support.

A report by the UK Homecare Association (UKHCA) has found that councils are going to need an additional £753 million to ensure their local care providers can meet these new pay requirements. Without that funding, care services risk closing down entirely…Care services have been badly affected over recent years by cuts and this is a financial stretch which we cannot meet. Quite simply the home care market, is at risk of collapse.”

I do not think that the Enfield Carers Centre got the answer it was looking for from the Chancellor, and I hope that it will hear some better news today from the Minister. I agree with the National Care Association when it states:

“UK Care Services are an irreplaceable part of the fabric of the NHS. There should be no doubt that what is under threat is a UK support service which is essential to local government and NHS care provision.”

I would like to know how the Minister will address those concerns and what steps the Government intend to put in place to provide a transparent and sustainable funding settlement for social care. The older and disabled people who rely on the service, their families and the all too often unsung heroes who work in it deserve no less.

15:02

[Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) for securing this important debate. Proper funding for care homes and social care can go a long way to reducing the pressures faced by our NHS. We must continue to do all we can to integrate social care and the NHS. I am worried that under this Government, it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so, and care homes are becoming increasingly underfunded and overstretched.

Last November, figures were published showing that 5,247 patients were stuck in hospital beds. They were well enough to be discharged, but doctors and nurses felt they could not discharge them because of the lack of care available to the patient. The majority of such people are elderly. They cannot leave hospital because there is no space in their local care homes, and there are not the facilities or staff to look after them in their own homes. Our adult care facilities are not adequate for many people up and down the country, and the problem will only get worse, in many places, under the Government’s proposals.

I have some concerns about the new proposal to give councils the ability to raise council tax by 2%, which they will be able to spend only on social care. It looks like a good initiative at first glance, but council leaders and healthcare professionals can see that it is simply smoke and mirrors. The social care precept, as it has been labelled, will disproportionately affect poorer councils. Councils such as Rochdale will be worse off, while richer areas will be better off. The leadership of Rochdale Borough Council have rightly raised concerns about the policy. Because much of Rochdale’s housing is in council tax bands A and B, the proposal will raise only an extra £1.3 million. That is why poorer councils will be worse off. Rochdale council has already faced cuts to its budget of up to £200 million since 2010. We are struggling to cope, and services are being stripped to the bare bones.

The precept is welcome, but it will barely scrape the surface of the problem. The funding gap in social care and care home provision is getting worse. The Local Government Association estimates that it is growing by £700 million a year, and the King’s Fund estimates that it will be £3.5 billion by the end of this Parliament. The 2% increase will raise the least money in the areas of greatest need, so it will only increase health inequality, and it will vastly increase funds for councils that are already wealthy.

The most vulnerable have already seen their social care provision cut. The Joseph Roundtree Foundation points out that during the last Parliament, spending on social care fell by £65 per person in the most deprived communities, compared with a rise of £28 per person in the least deprived communities. The Government must do more to help the most vulnerable.

In the autumn statement, the Government announced that from 2017, funding expected to be worth £1.5 billion in 2019-20 will be available to local government. That funding will be included in the better care fund, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hove pointed out. It will go some way to addressing the funding gap and the disparities that will be caused by the 2% rise, but it will not be enough. The director of adult care for Rochdale, Sheila Downey, has made it clear to me that she does not know how much of that money will arrive in Rochdale, or how the funding gap will be filled until 2017.

The increase in the minimum wage will also have an effect on social care services and care homes, as has been pointed out. I welcome the raising of the minimum wage, but it must be accompanied by increased funding to allow for it. Care workers are some of the most underpaid, and they deserve their pay rise, so let us fund it properly. Rochdale’s director of adult care has raised that with me, because she is concerned about how she will find that money in her budget. She is working with local providers on the fees that will be required, but she is adamant that the pressure of the wage increase on social care budgets will not be fully met by the 2% increase. The widely cited ResPublica report from November, which my hon. Friend the Member for Hove mentioned, suggests that 37,000 care home beds could be lost if we do not fund the increase properly, because care providers will simply not be able to remain open. Alarm bells should be ringing. The loss of beds will need to be made up, and it will simply be made up in the NHS.

I finish by saying that I share the vision of an integrated health and social care system. We must achieve that if we are to have a health system that is fit for the 21st century. To achieve that, however, we cannot simply plug the gap; we need to invest in our social care and care homes now. Investment in care provision and homes can take the stress off the NHS. We saw all too recently in the case of the floods what a lack of investment can do. Let us not make the same mistake when it comes to social care.

15:07

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) for securing today’s timely and important debate. As a country, we need to give deep thought to the importance we place on social care. We have heard in this debate that constrained finances are skewing the opportunity to do that. I have always said that we can judge a country by the way it treats its older people, and I wonder how we really think we are doing against that test. Those who have served our country in so many different ways deserve the very best care, and I am not sure that our system is built on that model. In fact, the model is now built more on minimal provision as opposed to optimal provision. I wrestle with that approach, and I believe that we really need to think about the direction in which we are going.

The current black hole in state funding for care has been made more challenging as the years have gone on by local authority cuts. We have heard clearly about the impact of a 10.7% budget cut over five years, and the fact that care providers have to pay more has added further challenge. I really welcome an uplift in the pay of care staff, because they are paid a ridiculously low amount of money. They are also faced with pension uplifts, and they have had to wrestle with the rise in national insurance and steep rises in the cost of energy, food and other services. That has all happened at the same time as they face the increasing demands of a challenging and changing demographic, including people with multiple needs, and tighter budgets. What we are seeing is unrealistic: the demand is greater, but the money is less.

[Joan Ryan]

Will my hon. Friend add to that list the fact that the CQC rates more than 50% of nursing homes as inadequate and needing improvement? The people living in those homes are therefore living in inadequate situations. How will that change, given the circumstances she outlines?

[Rachael Maskell]

My right hon. Friend makes a really pertinent point. There has to be a debate about safety and about providing good, secure homes for individuals. If people are living in substandard conditions, that is simply unacceptable. If there are not the resources to put that right, we obviously fear for the future.

Another thing we know is that the pressure being put on so many care organisations will make older people far more vulnerable. As we have heard, tens of thousands of beds could be lost. If people do not have security in later life, it can have a real impact on their wellbeing.

As others right across the Chamber have said in the debate, the autumn statement has left many question marks, and one of the issues we are going to see as a result is inequality. Some of the communities with the most demand for investment in social care will get the least money from the precept the Chancellor set out. Taken with the further cuts that local authorities will experience, that will have a cumulative negative impact on the provision of social care. That is happening at the same time as the NHS is really struggling with discharges, because the provision is not there in the community. In my constituency of York Central, some of the transitional beds will be lost because of a care home closure programme, which I will return to.

Cuts to support services for the elderly, such as day care placements, are happening because of the cuts to local authorities, and they are having a detrimental impact. The little things that local authorities could provide that kept people safe in their homes and connected in their communities are now very much part of history, as opposed to part of the solution. We keep hearing that finances are tight, but we must remember that it was not the people in our care homes who caused the financial crash—but, my, how they are paying for it.

A care provider in my constituency has highlighted the challenges of the new minimum wage rate and asked how on earth they are going to pay it. They already have staff who are engaged on zero-hours contracts. They tell me they cannot pay for staff to travel between visits. I obviously question that, and I support paying staff proper wages, but I really worry about how providers will deal with these issues in the future and how they will survive. I have written to the Government to raise those concerns.

The issues I have outlined are particularly challenging in a city such as York, which has a high cost of living and high housing costs. When those are combined with low wages, it is virtually impossible to recruit care staff, and that adds to the sector’s challenges. As a result, the care model we have does not really address people’s needs. That has had a real impact on discharges from the NHS and on being able to give individuals timely care in the community. We are now seeing the cumulative impact of these things, as the care home closure programme across York means that fewer beds are available.

The problem we have is that care is seen as a zero-hours, minimum wage, low-esteem industry, when it should be regarded as a high-skilled, professional service and the funding should match that. Those who have the means can afford to pay for what they get—only just, but they can. However, for the rest, care packages are being driven to the absolute minimum. It would therefore be appropriate for us all to agree that current provision is totally unacceptable. We need to draw a line under that and to have a real debate about what needs to be done. After all, who are we talking about? Who are we providing care for? It is our mums and dads. It is the most vulnerable in our society—those with multiple disabilities, those with learning challenges, those with mental health challenges and those whose bodies are not quite working as they once did. One day, it will be us.

Who do we expect to care for those individuals? It is highly trained professionals—the very best—who are rewarded appropriately, motivated and driven to learn more and deliver more. Like everybody else, I have met care workers right across the sector—in fact, I spent time doing care work myself—and I know the passion they have for providing the optimum care for individuals, but if they are not given the time to care, how can they deliver that service?

The Kingsmill review “Taking Care”, which Labour brought forward before the last general election, set out a clear programme for improving care standards and providing training and remuneration. It also dealt with the important issue of registration. It is really important that care workers are state-registered to ensure public safety. The steps the review set out show how we can secure high standards in care and safeguard service users.

We then need to think about how and where care needs to be provided. Of course people have different needs, including physical needs. In my own clinical practice as a state-registered physiotherapist, I would often get people’s confidence up and get them back on their feet, only for them to go home and lose the support and stimulation they had had, because support was not available continually in the community. Falls prevention work, which really puts in investment upstream and provides care, means that individuals avoid things such as a fractured neck of femur, which is so expensive to treat, putting more pressure on the health service. Little steps can make such a difference in the community and in care homes, keeping people well and addressing their physical needs.

Likewise, we know that so many people have mental health challenges in later life—two thirds of the occupants of care homes experience some form of mental health challenge. It is really important that the setting individuals are placed in appropriately addresses those needs. We need to start thinking big on these issues. The Dutch—I hope I say this right—Hogeweyk dementia care village is a fantastic scheme. It is about state provision. We need that kind of investment and that imaginative, big thinking around how we provide care in our country.

The issues I have mentioned are exacerbated by some of the most prevalent diseases in our country—loneliness and isolation, and the social and emotional health of the most vulnerable in our society. The tightening of budgets is having a major impact on the wellbeing of old people. Investment in the issue can mitigate the worst aspects. I am totally passionate about that. It is heart-breaking that older people are just given 15-minute appointments, often with a stranger, as opposed to a full support network and a real life. Our goal should be helping people to live, not preparing them to die.

On the challenges we face, we need to take a step back and think about what we want from care provision in future. These are political choices and are possible if somebody believes they can deliver them. I talk to carers who share the vision I have outlined and who want the very best for the people they serve. I also talk to people in residential care, who want hope in their future. Those people would give momentum to a Government who would dare to grasp the nettle to make sure that we provide appropriate care in future.

I want quickly to set out the situation we have in York. I have had many conversations with the residents of care homes, their families and the staff. We are going through a transition. That has already resulted in two care homes closing, and a further two—Oakhaven and Grove House—are set to close early this year. Residents and their families are distraught about the fragmentation that that is causing. Residents are being moved to placements across the city and away from their families. Some placements are on the other side of the city from where their families live, so family members can no longer just pop in to see mum as they do at the moment. Residents are being moved away from their friends in the care home—for some, these are the only friends they have in the world. Staff are also being moved away from their homes. Residents feel that they have not been listened to and that they have been ignored, which is unacceptable.

The council has put its plans ahead of the support that it purports to want to deliver. It is remodelling social care. I very much support the last Labour Administration’s vision for that. However, the sequencing of the changes is detrimental. It is about putting money before people’s needs. We need to hold back on the transition that is taking place, to make sure that there is investment upstream, as opposed to making people fit the system and sacrifice some of the only bonds that they have.

We have gone badly wrong in many areas of social care, and do not currently place the value on care users and staff that we should. As I have said, this is about political choices and political priorities. I ask the Minister whether there could be any greater priority than getting this right. I urge Parliament from today to take the debate forward. I want all those who have participated in today’s debate to make sure that we prioritise social care so that it is seen as an urgent need to be addressed by the Government in this term, so that we do not have to face challenges and struggles we face at the moment of questioning the finances and the value we put on social care. The question is whether the Government are willing.

15:21

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve again under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) for obtaining this important debate with his customary determination to tackle the big challenges of the day and his concern for the most vulnerable in society. As everyone on both sides of the House has agreed during the debate, older people deserve the right to live with dignity and decency; but, as has also been discussed, too often that is not the case, and I am afraid the situation seems set only to get worse.

Eighty-six per cent. of care home places are run by the private sector for profit. Local authorities are the largest single purchasers of those places across the country. Because of intense budgetary pressures, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) and my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) clearly explained, local authorities reduced their fees by an average of 5% between 2010-11 and 2015-16. According to the sector analysts LaingBuisson, the care home sector is closing more beds than it is opening for the first time since 2005, with a net loss of 3,000 across the UK last year. In the north-east we expect to have a substantial crisis in social care as a result of the Government’s failure to grip the issue.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Hove said, the homes most at risk are those dependent on residents paid for by local councils at rates far below those paid by self-funding residents: proprietors say rates are actually below break-even point. In the north-east, only 18% of people requiring care are self-paying, compared with 54% in the south-east. In Surrey, by contrast, only 1% of people in residential homes are paid for by the state.

The Financial Times has noticed that the care home market is highly polarised between lucrative self-pay homes, mostly in south-east England, and those with local authority residents, such as Redcar and Cleveland, which are struggling. Given that disparity between areas such as Surrey and areas such as mine, and since there is a crisis in the funding not of residential care but of state residential care, it is probable that the market will not collapse nationally, but will fall over in areas such as mine where the state is the main payer. If a major provider struggles it is likely to mean that it will close its homes in the north but not the south.

There is no capacity in local government to take over those homes. Any private sector supplier that did so would be taking an unsustainable risk, because they are currently loss-making businesses. At the moment there appears to be no plan B for the Government. I want to ask the Minister whether he accepts the scale of the impending crisis. Crisis point will be reached shortly in our region as demand continues to increase while spending is drastically cut back. The Government’s care legislation will further increase the burdens on councils in England. The only way in which providers can make any money is by cutting services and by squeezing workers’ pay and conditions.

The comprehensive spending review in December 2015 gave councils the option of adding a social care precept of up to 2% to annual council tax bills to raise extra money to pay for adult social care. However, as well as being regressive, as we have already discussed, the precept will at best raise £2 billion by 2020, against a predicted funding gap of closer to £8 billion. Indeed, the King’s Fund estimates that at best the precept will raise £800 million.

I want to use this opportunity to raise some contributory factors to the crisis, which the Government need to address, and I will begin by talking about the care workforce and national minimum wage compliance. The Resolution Foundation has estimated that care workers—both those in care homes and those providing home care—are already collectively cheated of £130 million a year because of sub national minimum wage pay. That is driven by chronic underfunding of the care sector, poor employment practices, poor commissioning practices and the ineffective enforcement of the national minimum wage by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

One employer, which will remain nameless at this stage, has put to its workforce a set of proposed changes to terms and conditions, to prepare for the introduction of the national living wage. Those include withdrawing all bank holiday and overtime enhancements, removing contractual sick pay, scrapping the meal allowance for workers when they are eating with clients, asking workers to pay for their own registration with the Disclosure and Barring Service, enforcing eight hours per annum of unpaid training time, introducing new duties and making changes to existing duties. In care homes non-payment of the national minimum wage is driven by a failure to pay for actual hours worked, such as when staff are not properly recompensed for overnight sleep-ins or time spent training; failure to pay for uniforms; and deduction of money for accommodation that does not form part of an employment contract.

The Financial Times has said that,

“businesses that run care homes for the elderly are at risk of going bankrupt, especially those reliant on revenues from local authority funded places, from a double blow of the imminent increases in the minimum wage and tighter immigration rules, making it harder to recruit from overseas”.

That is the issue I want to discuss next. The care sector is particularly dependent on migrant labour. The latest estimates suggest that nearly a fifth of the workforce are non-British. Unison has highlighted a particular problem in the care home sector with regard to the treatment of migrant workers. In a recent round-table event, a group of Filipino workers reported that they were paying £300 a month each to share a flat with only one toilet and no lounge at the residential care home where they worked. The rate paid for the work they did was £7.02 per hour, but there were then monthly deductions. The deductions were for their uniform—they got one per year but had to pay every month—and for training; that is a breach of national minimum wage law. The cost would normally be more than £200 a month, and it transpired that the workers were not necessarily getting the uplifts in the minimum wage that they were entitled to.

The round table also heard that a working week for the staff could sometimes be as long as 60 hours, depending on staffing levels, despite the fact that they were contracted for 36 hours. They could also find themselves working a 10-hour night shift for a paltry £35, way below the national minimum wage, and with no sleeping permitted. The employer extorted £500 each from that group of workers as their initial five-year period in the job came to an end, on the basis that payments were needed to retain a licence to hire foreign workers and to protect their immigration papers. The staff were also subject to body searches before meeting the employers. To compound matters, they were then obliged to pay fees of £2,000 each for a solicitor to renew their work permits—in cash. The work permits are for work with that one employer, so if the workers lost them they would lose their visa and have to leave the country. Not only is the exploitation of immigrant workers immoral, but it drives down terms and conditions across the sector for all workers and reduces the number of job opportunities for local people.

I want to discuss some wider problems in the care home sector. The social care workforce are predominantly female, with the latest estimates suggesting that 82% of care workers are women and that the percentage is broadly similar across all types of care. Social care is a highly gender-segregated sector, with low pay and poor conditions reflecting, as my hon. Friend the Member for York Central has mentioned, the historic undervaluing of what is deemed to be women’s work. Compared with other sectors, the workforce are also particularly concentrated in the 45 to 60 age bracket. Government-backed attempts to move away from that disproportionately middle-aged demographic have foundered, largely on the basis that the quality of work, pay and conditions is simply not attractive enough to bring in younger staff.

Residential care tends to be based on shift work and there are often problems with short-staffing, with care workers being called on at short notice to cover shifts. That can be particularly problematic for night shifts, where the compensation is often insufficient. There may also be pressure from care providers to work beyond a 48-hour working week. Vacancy rates and staff turnover are high across the sector. Councils are struggling to retain social workers in the face of high caseloads, a blame culture and competition over pay. High turnover has damaging implications for the continuity and quality of care.

There is no English language requirement for care workers whose first language is not English. The overall level of training and qualifications across the care sector is low. There are expectations of induction training for staff but the nature and quality varies considerably. There is less training available in outsourced services, and there are particular concerns about agency staff not receiving training. There are increasing expectations for care workers to carry out medical treatments that have previously been the preserve of nurses or other NHS professionals, but there is no concomitant expansion in training. There are no longer any universal standards for providers to meet benchmarks for percentages of trained staff in their workforces. Without obligations it makes no business sense for providers to do that training voluntarily, because of the high turnover of staff. There is also no central quality assurance mechanism for training, which leads to a lack of faith in qualifications, and no incentive—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I ask the hon. Lady to bring her remarks to a close in the next few seconds.

[Anna Turley]

I will. In summary, the Government’s crisis in funding for care homes has pushed the sector to the brink. Terms and conditions for the workforce are being squeezed, and the current funding structure for local authorities is simply unsustainable. The Government must get a grip.

15:30

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

I thank the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) for securing this important debate. As Members might imagine, I have listened with great interest to the debate, albeit from a Scottish perspective. However, it is in all our interests and, indeed, in the interests of a decent society that those who require care can access the care they need, and are treated with dignity and respect wherever they live in the United Kingdom. There are challenges, many of which have been debated this afternoon, as our ageing population grows in number and as needs become more complex, requiring additionally trained and supported staff, and bringing all the pressures outlined by the hon. Member for Hove.

I declare an interest in the issue as my mother-in-law, Iris Gibson, is fortunate to receive wonderful care at the marvellous Haylie House, which is located in the lovely Ayrshire coastal town of Largs in my constituency of North Ayrshire and Arran. Hon. Members might be interested in the approach taken in Scotland under the Scottish National party Government, who have been working hard to ensure that as many people as possible who need care in Scotland receive care in their own homes. Indeed, the number of older people receiving personal care services in their own homes in Scotland has increased from 36,000 in 2004-05 to 47,810 in 2013-14.

Since July 2002, local authorities in Scotland can no longer charge for those personal care services. In addition, payments for free personal and nursing care have been increased in line with inflation annually by the SNP Government since April 2008, improving the lives of about 7,000 to 8,000 vulnerable older people in Scotland, but, of course, funding continues to be a challenge in Scotland and across the UK.

As for carers, Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has pledged to increase carer’s allowance to the same rate as jobseeker’s allowance, which is a clear recognition of the very important job that carers do. I want to pick up on something that has been highlighted by several Members, which is what I would call the so-called national living wage because it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. It is a minimum wage, unlike the Scottish living wage that actually relates to the cost of living. The Scottish Government are a living wage employer and continue to encourage Scots-based businesses to become living wage accredited employers.

The hon. Member for Hove is correct that the caring sector has become associated with low pay. That is a scourge on that important sector, and must be acknowledged and tackled in any discussion about the future of the whole care sector. I agree very much with the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) that the provisions of the social care precept are not enough. What is needed is more investment in the care of older people from central Government. Many private care homes argue that they will struggle to pay the national living wage, as outlined by the Chancellor, of £7.20 an hour from April—never mind the living wage that the Scottish Government are encouraging employers to pay, which currently stands at £8.25 an hour.

We have heard from the hon. Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) about some shocking employment practices. The SNP is committed to improving the quality of care in Scotland and will consider carefully the impact of the living wage on the care sector. Make no mistake: any discussion about how to improve the quality of care must include a discussion about the scourge of low pay. Indeed, the Scottish Government are taking forward the recommendation of the residential care taskforce to undertake financial modelling of the costs of paying the living wage.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I ask that the hon. Lady sticks as closely as possible to the subject of the debate, which is care homes in England. I have given her some latitude but she is somewhat straying off the point.

[Patricia Gibson]

I was simply going to ask the Minister to ensure that the scourge of low pay is tackled as far as possible under the Chancellor’s arrangements to ensure that the wage levels are at least enforced. As we have heard from the hon. Member for Redcar, that is not even currently the case.

It is clear that there are urgent concerns about care homes, which must be addressed. I look forward to the Minister’s taking the opportunity to do so. The urgency of the concerns are apparent as care home margins are squeezed by a lack of investment and a failure to deal with the funding of long-term care to an acceptable and sustainable level with local authorities facing even tighter budgets. We should recognise that care services are a vital component of the fabric of the NHS.

What happens in the care sector in England has a direct consequence for the care sector across the UK. Caring for our older population and caring for our carers is an issue of social justice. Of course there is a price tag and a cost for supporting older people, but politics is about choices and the challenges of our ageing population will only increase. We must make the choice to treat them with dignity, and to support carers and our older population as much as we can. We cannot afford not to.

15:35

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in a debate with you as the Chair, Mrs Main. I think it is the first time for me, although others have a different experience. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) on securing this important debate. As well as his speech, there have been speeches and interventions from my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan), my hon. Friends the Members for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff), for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk), for York Central (Rachael Maskell) and for Redcar (Anna Turley), the hon. Members for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) and for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman), and the SNP spokesman, the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson).

The care home sector in England is in crisis. A toxic combination of a chronic lack of funding plus rising demand and increased costs means that care providers are facing an extremely difficult time. I will go on to say more but we heard a great deal about that during the debate. The social care settlement announced in the autumn statement does little to provide the additional resources that the care home sector needs. As I said in Health questions last week, the Government’s funding proposals for social care are risky, uncertain and late. They are risky because the better care funding is back-loaded. It does not reach £1.5 billion until 2019. Indeed, it offers nothing this year and only £100 million next year.

Funding from the social care precept is uncertain. It can only raise £1.6 billion if every single council decides to raise council tax by the maximum amount and that is by no means certain. Only about half of councils chose to increase council tax this year. Despite social care pressures, it is unlikely that all councils will want to implement an unpopular tax increase at this time. Both sources combined are late, because they do not help this year and they only reach £3.5 billion in 2019-20. Council leaders—including, I think, a council leader in Essex—wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to move some of the funding forward.

In a joint review of the spending review undertaken by the King’s Fund, the Health Foundation and the Nuffield Trust, the total funding gap for social care is found to be between £2.8 billion and £3.5 billion by the end of this Parliament. We need to make it a goal to close that gap. The three organisations conclude:

“Public spending on social care as a proportion of GDP will fall back to around 0.9 per cent by 2019/20, despite the ageing population and rising demand for services. This will leave thousands more older and disabled people without access to services.”

I suspect that it is probably hundreds of thousands, not just thousands.

The plans for the social care precept are seen as unfair due to the wide variations in the revenue that local councils can raise from their council tax base. Deprived areas can have the highest need for publicly-funded social care, yet councils in those areas are less able to raise significant additional revenue from council tax.

Let me give the example of my local authority in Salford. The adult social care budget is now £61 million. It has had to be cut by £15 million since 2010 due to cuts in the central Government grant, and 2% of our council tax—the maximum we could raise if everyone paid and, of course, they do not—is £1.6 million a year so that does not close the gap. Ministers have failed to explain how the social care precept can be implemented in a fair way that addresses the differences in need across the country. That is important.

The care sector responded to the spending review by saying:

“We believe the package put forward for social care will not enable us to fill the current gap in funding, cover additional costs associated with the introduction of the National Living Wage, nor fully meet…growth in demand due to our ageing population… the settlement is not sufficient, not targeted at the right geographies and will not come soon enough to resolve the care funding crisis.”

That is absolutely clear, and it is the sector itself saying that.

The social care funding crisis is most apparent in the care homes sector. In his opening speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Hove gave a useful analysis of the differences between large and small providers, but I will focus on what could happen with the biggest care home operator. Four Seasons owns some 470 homes and cares for 20,000 residents, mainly older people. It has been reported that, in the third quarter of 2015, Four Seasons lost more than £25 million before tax, and the rating agency Standard & Poor’s has warned that Four Seasons could run out of money in as little as six months. Squeezed local authority fees and the cost of temporary nursing staff are cited by the company as the reason for its financial difficulty, and we know from this debate that those pressures are only going to rise.

The so-called national living wage will be introduced in April 2016, and we have just heard the views of the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran, the Scottish National party spokesperson, on that. Perhaps the key thing, whatever we think of the level of the national living wage, and it probably is not enough, is that the Government have so far provided no assistance to help care home providers or local authorities to address the increasing costs caused by their own policy, welcome though it is, because increasing the pay of staff working in the care sector is vital—I think we all agree on that.

Before the spending review, a sector-wide group of charities, organisations and providers wrote to the Chancellor expressing concerns about the funding gap in social care. They said that a £2.9 billion social care funding gap would have these results:

“Up to 50% of the care home market will become financially unviable and care homes will start to close their doors. 74% of homecare providers who work with local councils, have said that they will have to reduce the amount of publicly-funded care they provide.”

Care homes are already finding it difficult to provide quality care, as we have heard. The CQC’s 2015 report recognised that, of course, adult social care providers face challenging times, but it raised concerns, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hove did, that nursing homes provide a poorer quality of care than other adult social care services. Indeed, just under half of nursing homes rated up to 31 May 2015 were rated good or outstanding, and one in 10 were rated inadequate. That trend is likely to continue unless the funding gap is addressed.

We have heard about the ResPublica report released in November, which projected a funding gap of more than £1 billion for older people’s residential care alone by 2020-21. My hon. Friend referred to that, and it could result in a loss of some 37,000 beds, which would be greater in scale than the collapse of Southern Cross. A loss of beds on that scale would have significant costs for individuals, families and the NHS. If all the residents of lost beds in care homes included in the report were to flow through to hospitals, the annual cost to the NHS is put by the report at £3 billion.

There has been excellent coverage in this debate of the postcode lottery that exists in certain regions of the UK. Of course, care homes in certain regions are much more likely to be subject to significant financial pressures. A market insight report by LaingBuisson found that the proportion of self-funders varies dramatically between regions, and we have already heard some examples. In 2014, in the north-west, only 18% of residents were self-funders, compared with 54% of residents in the south-east. That contrast has already been drawn out by my hon. Friends. Those differences have significant implications for the financial viability of care homes in regions with higher levels of local authority-funded residents.

It is no surprise that the Government’s policies have failed to attract investment in state-funded social care, and it has not happened on its own; but many providers have been forced to attract private funders to maintain their profitability, and LaingBuisson concluded:

“Prospective new care home developments for state-funded clientele…struggle to meet investment criteria because of inadequate fee levels on offer from local authorities in most areas of the country”.

That is a serious point.

The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle raised the issue of migrants working in nursing in the care sector, but there is a further issue with recruitment to which my hon. Friend the Member for York Central referred. Independent Age and the International Longevity Centre produced a report called “Moved to Care,” which raised that issue:

“Migrants and particularly non-EU migrants play a big role in the care workforce. Nearly 1 in…5 care workers was born outside of the UK”.

The report states that one in seven care workers—more than 191,000 people—is a non-EU migrant. The care sector has a vacancy rate of nearly 5%. That is the recruitment problem that my hon. Friend the Member for Hove talked about. Given those statistics, the serious thing is that care workers do not appear on the shortage occupation list, so a fall in net migration could have a serious impact on the care sector. As the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle asked—this is in addition to what I was going to ask today—would it be viable for skilled care workers, including senior care workers, to be included on the tier 2 shortage occupation list, as are nurses?

Good quality, affordable care in old age is a basic right, but the current pressures that care providers and local authorities face mean that there is a risk that good care will become the preserve of the wealthy. Julia Unwin, the chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, has said that the effects of reduced home care capacity would be “devastating.” She said that,

“care homes are already under financial pressure.”

We have heard ample examples of that. She continued,

“if proper funding is not provided…with these additional costs, the Government risks creating a two-tier care home system where good care is only available to those who can pay for it.”

Ministers must do more to ensure that the most vulnerable people in our society start to receive the good-quality care that they need.

A sustainable financial settlement is needed, but the Government’s policies are ineffective and are failing to take account of differing needs across the country. We had an opportunity for a settlement with the Dilnot reforms, but chronic underfunding has led to long delays in implementation. Will the Minister reiterate his support for the implementation of the Dilnot reforms? After all, page 65 of the Conservative manifesto—that was not very long ago—stated that that is what the party would do.

Whatever we do about the cap on care costs, we must first address the deepening funding crisis. A first step would be for the Government to admit that the plans announced in the spending review do not address the funding crisis that has been so amply referred to in this debate. What steps will be taken to protect services from collapse? That is the priority. Without a radical change in policy, care homes will be unable to offer the services needed to ensure what almost everybody in this room would want—that every older person has the care they need and the dignity and respect that they deserve.

15:47

[The Minister for Community and Social Care (Alistair Burt)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I congratulate the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) on securing the debate and thank him for introducing it courteously and knowledgeably. He is a valuable addition to the House, as indeed are a number of the new Members who have spoken. This is another example of a debate where the House’s knowledge and passion is conveyed in an entirely reasonable but challenging manner. I do not think this is the only debate we will have on this subject, so we will return to a number of issues.

I thank colleagues for their contributions. My hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) spoke about the quality care provided in our care homes, and it is important not to lose sight of that. The right hon. Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) spoke about costs—we will come back to that—and workforce issues. The hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) spoke about the need to ensure that local authorities in poorer areas are covered, and I will speak about that. The hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) spoke about choices, and I will come back to her on that in a moment.

The hon. Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) spoke knowledgeably about workforce issues. The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson)—we wish her mother-in-law well in the home where she is situated—gave more examples of what is happening in Scotland. I am always keen to see whether we can find anything that can be extrapolated from what is done up there. The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) spoke with her usual eloquence and from her strong background in the subject. Again, we will be covering a number of these issues over quite some time, and it cannot be completed today. I thank colleagues from all parties who made interventions.

I will not be able to respond to every point in 10 minutes. I will talk about quality and care issues, the spending issue and contingency—what to do if there is a problem. I think those are the three biggest things. That does not mean that I am uninterested in integration and winter pressures, which we believe we are working through and tackling. I will not talk much about the workforce, but I entirely agree that we should value the workforce at all levels and provide a decent career path. I agree entirely with the view that everyone has to be valued in a way that has not really been the case in social care up to now.

There are a number of other issues that I will just not be able to touch on. If there were specific questions directed at me and I do not cover them, I will go through them and write to the appropriate Member.

In general, we all start from a common position on the importance of this issue and the context in which it is set: an ageing population; people living longer with multiple long-term conditions; and many of our care workers working with dedication, both in homes small and large and in domiciliary care. I praise Chris Ryan of Bedford, who does much the same job as the gentleman the hon. Member for Hove mentioned in looking after a smaller home. It is a family business with a great sense of care and compassion, and I see those things in many homes.

May I start with a few words about quality? I am conscious of time, and I will try to keep my remarks on the three main issues that I want to cover quite short. In a way, we cannot win with the inspection regime. If inspection is done thoroughly and reveals things that need to be changed and improved, I can be lambasted for things that are inadequate. On the other hand, if we do not have a regime that turns up the things that need to be changed, then we are missing things.

The tougher inspection regime and the work that the Care Quality Commission is doing are good for us all. The bulk of homes—60% of the homes inspected, and a third of all homes have been inspected—have been rated “good” or “outstanding”. The CQC started with some local knowledge and wanted to go to the most difficult homes first. When it goes back to them it sees improvement, because the job of inspecting is not just about closing people down; it is also about seeing what improvement needs to be made.

In many cases, care is not about resource per se. I will never stand here as Minister and say that money and resource do not matter, but I will always say that making sure there is good-quality care is about many other things as well. There is tremendous variability of provision. There are people who handle the same resource in very different ways, and some are poorer at it than others. Quality of management, quality of leadership and in particular the use of registered managers in homes are all important issues, and there is much that can be learned through the inspection regime.

It is important for us to set out the five key questions, so that we remember what the regime is intended do. These questions are asked of each service that is inspected: is it safe, is it caring, is it effective, is it responsive, and is it well led? All inspections deliver a rating for the answers to each of those five key questions, on a scale that ranges from “inadequate” to “requires improvement” to “good” and “outstanding”. It is right that we do that, and I am not afraid of the answers that have been produced.

However, I want to go slightly beyond that process. I am never content to rest on what the inspection regime is bringing forward; I listen to other voices as well. Although I do not respond to all the tweets I receive, I read them all, and I am in contact with some of those who represent families and with those who have uncovered things and who do not feel that the inspection regime is doing its job. I say to them that we can do more, and I am listening carefully. I want to use the experiences of those who have been through poor circumstances to see whether we can make any changes that will make such circumstances less likely. There will never be nil bad circumstances, although there should be, but we must do all we can, and I am listening carefully to some less heard voices to try to ensure that that is the case.

I will speak about spending, which I know is at the heart of this debate, before I cover contingency. The hon. Member for York Central spoke about choices. I will not labour this point, but it needs to be said, because it is at the heart of all we do—yes, there are choices to be made. In a different context, I hear much talk about “mandate” from Opposition Members. The Government also have a mandate, and it is a difficult one. It is to try to ensure that our spending on public services matches the needs of the population and also looks after the future, ensuring that we are not running a continuous debt and running into more debt. It is a difficult choice, and we put it to the people and they gave their answer. We are working with that mandate.

The hon. Lady also said that how a society treats its old people is a measure of the quality of that society. That is quite true, as it is of our treatment of our children, those with mental health issues and our prisoners. It is also true of how we treat the future and what we leave for the future. That is why this Government, like every previous Government who have had to make difficult choices, including Labour Governments, have never been able to spend as much money as some would have wished. That is at the heart of this debate as well. We will do what we can with what we have got, and I will explain how we will do it, but that is the difficult choice that we have to make, and the hon. Lady does not have to do so yet. All I will say is that I will explain what we are trying to do in making that choice.

[Peter Kyle]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, and for letting us know that he reads all the tweets he receives, because that has opened up another avenue for communicating with him; he may well regret that, even by the end of today.

Part of the Minister’s mandate is to reduce spending—we understand that—and part of his mandate is to spend money better, which is an issue that has come up time and time again in this debate. There was cross-party support for an independent evaluation of the better care fund and how it applies to the care home industry. May I specifically ask him whether he will support the call for that evaluation, which came from Government Members as well as from Labour Members?

[Alistair Burt]

We are constantly evaluating the better care fund. We work on it with local authorities on a regular basis, and with the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, so it is constantly being evaluated. I do not know whether something else would add to that process.

[Barbara Keeley]

I have made the point about choices to the Chancellor in the past. Perhaps the Minister has not got the Chancellor on side yet; I hope that he will do so. However, the inheritance tax giveaway that this Government have enacted will cost £1 billion by 2020. How far would that £1 billion go in social care? A long way.

[Alistair Burt]

We could all pick items of Government spending that we do not particularly fancy and say, “Oh, if only it was applied to this, it would be great.” Every single Government and every single Chancellor have faced the same argument. We are where we are. We have made choices about a whole variety of things, and we have a range of obligations to deliver to the public. In this particular instance, however, I want to talk about what we are spending and what is new. I will do so briefly, but I must cover that.

The Government are giving local authorities access to up to £3.5 billion of new support for social care in 2019-20. We believe that the precept could raise up to £2 billion a year, and with that money and the £1.5 billion that was included in the spending review, we believe that by 2019-20 there will be the opportunity for a real-terms increase in spending on social care.

[Barbara Keeley]

Will the Minister give way?

[Alistair Burt]

No. I have only three minutes. If I give way, I will not be able to cover everything now.

[Barbara Keeley]

I just want the Minister to say how councils such as the Essex council that wrote to the Prime Minister will manage until 2019.

[Alistair Burt]

I will give two responses to that and talk about the equalisation of funding. First, we are working closely with local authorities and with ADASS. I do not pretend in any way that the situation will not be tough for the next couple of years; it will be. However, we believe the resource is there. Secondly, the social care precept will come in this year, and that money will be made available more quickly. It will be difficult and it will be tight, but a lot of changes are being made and a lot of work is being done to ensure that services are more efficient. Those things are going on all the time.

I want to address the problem that was raised about the precept and explain how it will be used to ensure that local authorities do not miss out. The Department for Communities and Local Government published for consultation a provisional local government finance settlement in December. Recognising that local authorities have varying capacity to raise council tax, it is proposed that the additional funding for the better care fund that will be available from 2017 should be allocated using a methodology that provides greater funding to authorities that benefit less than others from additional council tax flexibility for social care. That will include consideration of the main resources available to local authorities, including council tax and business rates.

[Peter Kyle]

Will the Minister give way?

[Alistair Burt]

No, if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me; I have 90 seconds left.

That is how there will be some degree of equalisation, to respond to the point made by the hon. Member for Rochdale. More money is being spent, and there is an equalisation process.

I will speak about contingency plans briefly. Local authorities now have a responsibility, through the Care Act 2014, to monitor the care providers in their area for any early warning of difficulties. In total, 44 care providers are included. Local councils are also under a duty to provide contingency plans for what would happen if there was a failure of provision, and 95% of local authority areas are currently covered by such contingency plans. Of course, I am looking for answers from the other 5% to ensure that coverage is there. If there is a failure of provision, local authorities have a responsibility to step in, and we are addressing the situation to ensure that contingency provision is in place.

We believe that we have put in money that will assist the system and provide the care that is needed. With local authorities, we are constantly looking at what can be done to make things more efficient. We want to ensure that money is spent properly. That is why the social care precept is there; it can only be spent on social care. I have mentioned the position of councils that might be in particular difficulties over that issue, and over time, we will see whether that provision is sufficient. The Government and I will keep this issue under constant review, and we will talk about it again—

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).