(7 years, 5 months ago)
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Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)
I am delighted to have secured this debate about the regulation, inspection and complaints process for care homes for elderly people. Let me be clear about something from the start. In half an hour on a Thursday afternoon, it is not my intention to tackle the huge, overarching issue of social care provision in this country.
Peter Heaton-Jones
Members on both sides of the House know that social care provision is one of the biggest challenges that we face, but that debate must be for another day. My debate is about something very specific: the way in which privately run care homes for elderly people are inspected and regulated, and the process that exists to raise complaints when relatives believe that something is going wrong. This is vital for two reasons. First, we are talking about nothing less than the welfare of vulnerable elderly people. Secondly, I believe it is possible to make significant improvements at relatively little cost, and I hope in the next 15 minutes or so to set out why.
Before I do so, I will provide a little background. Why have I taken up this cause? Three years ago, while I was still a mere parliamentary candidate, a local resident in North Devon told me a very moving story. John Barrass’s mother, Vera, a former resident at a private care home, died in 2009. Mr Barrass had serious concerns about the care she received in the final weeks of her life, and believed that a poor system of inspection, regulation and complaint handling was a significant factor. Specifically, he believed that a mechanism did not exist to allow him satisfactorily to raise his concerns about shortcomings in his mother’s care.
I do not seek to reopen that case, and neither does my constituent. In the years since his mother died, Mr Barrass pursued all avenues available to him to have her case fully investigated. He invariably hit a brick wall, so he began to look beyond his individual circumstances to examine instead the more general question of how care homes are inspected and regulated, and how complaints are dealt with. He came to the conclusion that the system was simply not fit for purpose, and he met me to explain why. That was the birth of a long campaign, which reaches another milestone with this debate.
Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of my raising this matter in Westminster Hall on 4 November 2015. Since then, I believe we have made some progress, but much of what I said at the time still stands today. What I have to say is based largely on a report produced by Mr Barrass, which I have here, called “Care means care, Justice in care”. The report was created in memory of his late mother Vera who, in Mr Barrass’s words,
“spent a nightmare in care,”
which led him to spend seven years producing this document.
I have helped Mr Barrass to take this to the very top. The previous Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the former Member for Witney, received a copy and arranged a meeting with the former Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt). I am delighted to see him in the Chamber and pay tribute to him for the work that he did in this area, and for his sincere engagement with me and this campaign. Recently, the document was sent to the current Prime Minister. I quote Mr Barrass’s letter to her:
“I cannot bring my mother back or stop what I have agonisingly had to witness and go through, but I can try to stop this happening to others”.
I agree. An estimated 300,000 older people currently live in some 15,000 registered care homes in England. The average age of those people is 85, and a significant proportion suffer from dementia. They are largely without a voice, and that needs to change.
Jeremy Quin (Horsham) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on his campaign and his persistence with it. The matter affects many of us in this House; my constituents are still concerned about Orchid View care home and the issues that arose out of that. Does he agree that we have to learn from the mistakes of the past? We should have proper inquiries and proper investigations, and we should learn from those mistakes.
Peter Heaton-Jones
I thank my hon. Friend; I am sure that the Minister will have heard his comments. We need to move forward, and when things go wrong, we need to put them right.
The body responsible for the regulation and inspection of care homes is the Care Quality Commission, with which I have worked closely since launching this campaign. I believe that it is listening, but there is still considerable room for improvement. Today, the CQC’s website tells us that of the 448 care homes it has inspected most recently, a staggering 200—45%—have been rated as “requires improvement” or “inadequate”. There is no reason to believe that those figures are unrepresentative of the sector as a whole, which means that more than four in 10 of all establishments are not reaching the required standard. Surely the purpose of any system of inspection and regulation must be to drive up standards. The figures alone suggest that the current system simply is not working.
In June 2013, the CQC issued a consultation called, “A new start”, which proposed a whole new approach to inspection across all sectors, including care homes. That approach was confirmed in October 2013, and the new inspection regime was introduced. I broadly welcome it, but there are still huge question marks over its implementation. The original deadline for carrying out an initial inspection of all care homes was February 2016. However, in July 2015, the National Audit Office found that just 9% of care homes had been assessed because of a shortfall of about 160 inspectors. Not surprisingly, the original February 2016 deadline to complete the work was not going to be met, so it was pushed back to this October—last month. Yesterday, when my office asked the CQC for an update, it told us that it is
“committed to completing the first phase of the comprehensive inspection programme by March 2017”.
In other words, this new deadline—the third—is more than a year later than the original target.
I absolutely recognise that the CQC faces many challenges. The managers and inspectors are working hard, but my point is that we would not accept a delay of more than a year in the inspection of NHS services, so we should not accept it just because we are dealing with private sector care homes. We are still talking about vulnerable people who might well be suffering. We need to get a grip on this problem and to challenge the CQC to undertake its inspection programme in as timely a way as possible. I seek to be helpful when I say, “Let us, as a Government, work with the CQC to ensure that it delivers what seems to me to be such an important inspection programme without further delays.”
That brings me to another major area of concern: the CQC’s role in handling complaints, and indeed the role of myriad organisations and authorities involved in this area. What can someone do if they fear that an elderly relative is being neglected or mistreated, or is not being given the right healthcare? What can they do if they fear that their relative’s life might even be in danger, and the care home provider has dismissed the complaint or will not even listen to it?
When things go wrong, and a member of the public needs to make a complaint against a care home, they are faced with a bewildering labyrinth, and that needs to change. The website of the CQC, the body responsible for the regulation, says that the CQC
“is unable to investigate individual complaints”
against providers. To many people, that will seem odd.
Many people are in care homes commissioned by their local authority, so that offers another route for making a complaint. However, the complaints procedures in many local authorities—I speak as a former councillor in a unitary borough—consist of several layers, shall we say, and such a system does not lend itself to a speedy resolution. Not all people in care homes are in places paid for by local authorities, but even if they were, their complaint may fail to get through those many layers.
Should such an individual go to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman? Again, no, because that is another brick wall. The ombudsman says:
“By law the Ombudsman cannot look into complaints about privately funded healthcare.”
There is another possibility, which is an organisation called the Independent Healthcare Sector Complaints Adjudication Service. The ombudsman’s website states that people “may”—I stress that word—“have the option” of going to that organisation, which covers some independent healthcare providers, but if the healthcare provider of the person concerned is not one of them, they are stuck.
In a nutshell, the system is bewildering. It lacks accountability and transparency, and would leave most people confused and frustrated. People simply do not know who to turn to when they are worried that something is not right. Given that level of confusion, let us imagine what the situation is like for people whose elderly relative is in a care home. They are worried and in an emotional state, yet still have to deal with an incredibly complex complaints procedure.
I believe we could solve this quickly and cheaply, simply by requiring every care home to display a standard notice clearly setting out the complaints procedure with the relevant contact details. It seems incredible—I use the word in its literal sense—that that is not already mandatory. I ask the Minister to investigate with the CQC the possibility of producing such a notice. Something that simple really could make a huge difference.
As for the longer term, in the document I referred to earlier, my constituent John Barrass is convinced that we need one body only to investigate, regulate and handle complaints about care homes, with that being its one and only purpose. That suggestion deserves serious consideration.
A further problem thrown up by this entire process has been highlighted effectively by an organisation in Devon—not in my constituency, as it happens, but elsewhere in the county—called Your Voice Matters. I pay tribute to its founder and director, Jenny Moore, who has done very good work in this area. I have met her a number of times, most recently yesterday, in preparation for this debate. The issue in question is the growing number of cases where relatives are banned from care homes simply for complaining. This can take the form of a complete ban or of restricted visits; in some cases, it has even been known to lead to the eviction of the elderly person from the home.
Your Voice Matters has launched a good campaign called “Rights 2 Speak Up 4 Care”. It has identified the issue succinctly. In a nutshell, it is that private care homes are defined in law as ultimate landlords. Quite simply, they can decide who goes on the premises and who does not. Families who raise concerns are threatened or banned. As I have said, sometimes residents are evicted, and a private paying resident is not protected under any legislation—not the Health and Social Care Act 2012 nor the Human Rights Act 1998, for example. A private care home also has the power to prevent health professionals from visiting the home. Let us think about that for a moment: a care home has the power to stop doctors and nurses going into it to visit its clients.
Something has to change. Recommendations from Your Voice Matters include legislation to close those loopholes and to give protection to all residents and their families, a review of the relevant legislation and an independent panel to offer a fair hearing should a private care home want to place restrictions on a family member or a resident. Your Voice Matters has been working on this for some time, and literally yesterday—just yesterday—there was something of a breakthrough. In the run-up to this debate, there has been a flurry of media activity, with TV and radio programmes covering the issue. Yesterday, the CQC published new guidelines on its website. Care homes will now be required to keep a register of any occasions when relatives are banned or people are evicted. I am not convinced that that goes far enough, but it is a start, and I will keep working with Your Voice Matters to ensure that we go further.
That campaign group has made a number of other recommendations that I will mention briefly, as they have considerable merit. It suggests there should be better protection for whistleblowers who wish to highlight shortcomings in homes, as well as better training, with a mandatory training course for all those who work in or manage care homes.
I have referred several times to my constituent Mr John Barrass. He has carried out an investigation lasting seven years but, as he says, he is only one of the 65 million little people in the UK—those are his words—who are very rarely listened to but whose experiences, and what they have witnessed and suffered, should not be ignored any more. He says:
“I just wish we had been raising these issues before mum had this serious stroke, and helped to change the care system. Maybe, just maybe, my mother would not have had to go through what she did and my father and I would not have gone through 11 years of suffering.”
I want to leave enough time for us to hear from the Minister, but let me be clear about one further thing before I conclude. Many fantastic caring professionals work in care homes. They do their jobs on low wages and care brilliantly for many people. The owners and managers of many care homes are committed to providing the best possible service. They face all the pressures of running a small business and the costs that that entails. There are good managers, investigators and staff at the CQC. I do not wish to criticise those who are doing well, but I do seek to call out those who need to do better.
I should briefly mention the many organisations and individuals who contacted me in advance of the debate. I am unable to name them all, but I have received good representations from the British Medical Association, Independent Age, Hootvox, which is an organisation looking at ways to measure the success or otherwise of care homes, and many other individuals and constituents.
I end with this thought. The problem is that we have a growing number of cases in which care homes are simply not coming up to scratch. I have spent many days, weeks and months on this, discussing it with my constituent John Barrass and the Your Voice Matters campaign group in Devon. Whenever we discuss it, we keep coming back to one thing. I said exactly this a year ago in Westminster Hall and I say it again now: this is not about processes, systems or organisations, but about people—people who do not have a voice in a system in which, let us remember, four in 10 care homes fail to reach a satisfactory standard on the CQC’s measures. That means that some vulnerable, sick and elderly people are not being properly cared for. That cannot be right. I look forward to hearing from the Minister. We have to do something and we have to act now.
Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)
With the permission of my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) and the Minister, I am grateful to be able to take just a moment to speak.
I am here to encourage both my hon. Friend and the Minister. I was very moved by the debate last year, which chimed with my sense that something needs to be looked at in the care system. The stone in the shoe or the grit in the oyster often brings something necessary to the surface. I am grateful for what my hon. Friend said about the progress made by the Department and the CQC in continuing to work to ensure that care homes realise their responsibilities to others. I encourage him and the Minister because great work is done in care homes. However, there are still dark corners on which the light must be shone. To protect families, it is essential that the things brought out by my hon. Friend’s campaign and the media in the past couple of days must come to an end to give the public confidence. I have every confidence that the Minister and her colleagues will continue to work on this and that we will be reassured.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Nicola Blackwood)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) for securing this important debate. He is a doughty campaigner. As he said, it is almost a year to the day since he last raised the issue in the House and he has taken much action since. I pay tribute to my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), for his work. He has laid great foundations for the work we are doing now. As he said, care homes play a vital role in our society, but the decision to move into a care setting or place a family member there can be exceedingly stressful. It is essential that the public have confidence in the quality of care that they seek. Poor care, abuse and neglect are completely unacceptable at all times, whatever the cause, and we are determined to stamp them out.
My hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin) is right that we must learn from the mistakes of the past. That is why in October 2014 we introduced a tougher CQC inspection regime based on the five important questions that matter most to people: are services safe, caring, effective, well led and responsive to people’s needs? It is why we brought in a new criminal offence of ill treatment and wilful neglect, and why a fit and proper person test has been introduced to ensure that providers do not recruit directors who are known to have been responsible for unacceptable standards of care.
The CQC can and does take robust action against providers that breach regulations and standards, from issuing warning notices and fines, through imposing conditions on a provider’s registration, to cancelling that registration altogether. During 2015-16, the CQC took 901 enforcement actions in adult social care, ranging from warning notices to prosecuting providers.
The CQC now has specialist inspection teams, which under the leadership of the chief inspector of adult social care include people who have personal experience of care. Inspections are required to take into account the views of service users and their families. Furthermore, the great majority of its adult social care inspections are now unannounced. The timing of inspections is based on assessment of provider risk, but their frequency in usual circumstances can be expected to be at least every 24 months.
The CQC’s fundamental standards that registered providers are required to meet include two very important registration requirements. The first is the duty of candour, which requires providers to be open with service users about all aspects of their care and to inform service users where their failures are in their care. The second is, as I have said, a fit and proper person requirement for directors that ensures that accountability for poor care can be traced all the way to the boardroom if necessary. These standards now give the CQC an effective power to prosecute providers in cases where a failure to meet standards results in avoidable harm or a significant risk of such harm.
Jeremy Quin
Will my hon. Friend or one of her ministerial colleagues kindly meet me and my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) specifically on that point in relation to Orchid View? We would be most grateful if that was possible.
Nicola Blackwood
I am absolutely sure that the Minister with responsibility for this area will do so.
The point I am making is that together we now have a more robust inspection standard and the fundamental standards to ensure greater accountability for providers of unacceptable standards of care. The CQC now has a much stronger baseline of information that tells us about the quality of adult social care across the country. From October 2014 to the end of July 2016, it inspected and published ratings for more than 16,000 adult social care services, out of a total of some 25,000.
As my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon highlighted, I recognise that delivering this more comprehensive inspection programme has taken longer than originally planned. The National Audit Office itself acknowledged that the CQC would have been hard pressed to have been aware of the amount of work needed to complete the initial round of inspections and re-inspections. The CQC acknowledged that it experienced early difficulties in recruiting sufficient inspectors with the right specialty and calibre. These problems are now resolved and the Department agreed with the CQC that it should consider the quality and rigour of inspections, and having the staff to carry them out, as the most important issue. The CQC is now on track to complete adult social care inspections by their published deadline of March 2017. We are closely monitoring its progress towards that delivery date.
We should be pleased that this work is starting to bear fruit. We have seen improvements since the observation that
“four in ten establishments are not reaching a required standard.”
At the end of July 2016, 72% of all adult social care services were rated good or outstanding, compared with 60% when the CQC published its findings in the 2014-15 “State of Care” report. The 2015-16 report shows that about 70% of care homes were rated good or outstanding, and 2% of all adult and social care services were inadequate at the end of July 2016, compared with 7% when the CQC published its last report. These quality ratings matter, because they are an important starting point for driving improvements. They are an encouraging early sign that this is happening.
The regulation of adult social care has three key roles to play: to identify poor practice and to take action to protect service users from the risk of harm; to encourage improvement by identifying areas of weakness; and to highlight and share good practice and success. All those roles are built on the foundations of effective use of data and rigorous inspection. The evidence shows that this is now happening. I would like to quote the National Audit Office, which confirms that the
“CQC has made substantial progress since 2011 and its new regulatory model strengthens the way it monitors and inspects hospitals, adult social care providers and GPs”.
We are by no means complacent, and we recognise the work that needs to be done to ensure that we are exactly where we want to be. Care homes look after some of the frailest people in society, and if there is a possibility of a home closing, or of other serious problems, it is completely understandable and reasonable for the families to have the reassurance that it will end up in the position they want it to be.
In recognition of the wider social care challenges, the Government are giving local authorities access to £3.5 billion of new support for social care by 2019-20. Since April, councils have been able to introduce a new social care precept, enabling them to increase council tax by 2% over the existing thresholds. This could raise up to £2 billion a year for social care by 2019-20. In addition, from April 2017, the spending review will make social care funds available for local government, rising to £1.5 billion by 2019-20 and to be included in the better care fund. Together, the new precepts and the additional better care fund contribution means that social care spending will increase in real terms by the end of the Parliament. Funding issues, however, are no excuse for poor care or—worse—abusive treatment. It does not cost any more to treat someone with kindness and compassion and to respect their dignity.
Finally, I want to address the important concerns around complaints that have been raised this evening. I know my hon. Friend is due to meet the Minister with responsibility for community health and care shortly on this matter and that he has previously met the Minister with responsibility for care services, the local government ombudsman and the CQC’s chief inspector. On the earlier point that he raised, I want to assure him that there is a statutory requirement for care home providers to operate a complaints system. Care homes are held to account for the effectiveness of the complaints process by the CQC.
We know from discussions we have had that the system is not working perfectly. Despite the progress we are making, we still hear too many stories that highlight people’s real concerns about quality and safety in social care—and we are determined to do better. We also hear that those receiving care or their families can be reluctant to make a complaint for fear of the consequences, especially if it is about a care home where someone is living. Indeed, only this week there was a story on the “Victoria Derbyshire” show about care homes banning relatives who made a complaint about the quality of care. We find that completely unacceptable. It is right that people and their families should feel able to raise concerns without fear of reprisals.
Ministers and the sector are looking to develop an adult social care quality strategy that will look at complaints and the culture of why people fear speaking up, as well as how we can improve the system to make it easier for them to complain. Care homes must have a complaints procedure, and if people are not happy with the response they receive the local government ombudsman can investigate complaints on their behalf. It is clear that everyone—not just the Government, and the CQC in its role as regulator, has a part to play in bringing about improvements in the quality of adult social care.
The Government are committed to improving the quality of social care, because care homes play a vital role in our society. There are many good and even outstanding homes, and we need to encourage them to share best practice so that it becomes the norm everywhere. We know that while a robust regulation and inspection regime is a key part of encouraging providers to improve, it is not the only influence. Sustained quality demands a commitment from everyone—from staff and providers to commissioners, funders and regulators—to make adult social care the best it can be. We are committed to working with all parts of the care system to make sure that we achieve just that, because our constituents deserve no less.
Question put and agreed to.