Covid-19: Social Care Services

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, for this opportunity to hold the Government to account. I return to a point I made during the emergency legislation debate on 26 March on the difference between the NHS and local government. The NHS is a top-down, centrally driven organisation which, remarkably, was able almost overnight to change everything it did and to focus on the medical emergency caused by the pandemic. Local government is much more complicated and fragmented, is dealing with a care system that was already broken, and is having to keep other vital public services going at the same time. Therefore the Government need to treat it differently.

The Government are issuing detailed guidance for social care, but it changes nearly every day. Local government and care providers need clear messages, delivered in good time, and quick responses when things do not work. For example, the testing sites are just not working in the way envisaged. The Government should now start to work with local authorities and local resilience forums to plan and roll out a series of accessible testing sites, so that people can get to them and we can get the testing numbers up.

Some 750,000 people applied to volunteer for the NHS, which has never managed volunteers terribly well. Most of them are not being used. People who signed up to GoodSAM need a clear message that they can and should volunteer via local resilience forums and local authorities. The NHS needs to start telling local authorities how many people in their area are signed up to GoodSAM and who they are, so that they can get on to the job of supporting vulnerable people in the community.

On 18 April, the Secretary of State announced a further £1.6 billion of funding for local government and described the people working in it as the unsung heroes at the forefront of the national effort to beat the virus, but £3.2 billion will not cover the costs which local authorities will have incurred during these four months, nor their loss of income. The pandemic will have a much longer tail for local government than it has done for the NHS. Will the Government now start to plan the transfer of funds and other resources from acute health services to local authorities and communities, which will struggle to deal with the effects of this virus long after the NHS has completed the majority of its work?