Social Care Funding (EAC Report)

Baroness Fookes Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fookes (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I applaud the hard-hitting and very practical report of my noble friend Lord Forsyth and his committee, and I hope that it will provide a real springboard for the Government to take action at last—like many other speakers, I think “at last” is very much the phrase to use. I also applaud the masterly overview provided by my noble friend Lord Young, and I hope that that will also be taken seriously into consideration.

I do not pretend to have the kind of expertise that other Members in this afternoon’s debate have shown, but I remember, as a very young, inexperienced MP, wondering why there was a divide between healthcare and social care—it seemed to be wholly artificial. Now, with my greater experience, I realise that it was a tremendous error which has led to the social side being left behind and, as many others have said, badly treated in terms of the workers, their pay and so forth. I hope that, in future, there will be a much better effort to bring together these two sides of the profession, as I see it.

I have some, rather unusual experience of being in a residential care home after a very serious illness some four years ago. I did not feel able to go to my own home alone, so I was fortunately able to book into a very good residential care home, but what I saw amazed me. There were good workers, and I was greatly impressed by the care they showed to the various residents, including me, and the great skills that were required. It was a real eye-opener for me, and it makes me very anxious that they should all receive proper training and have a proper career structure and better payments. I very much hope that this will be one result of the debate we are having this afternoon, based as it is on the excellent report by my noble friend Lord Forsyth.

In a very short time, I will pay tribute to the unpaid carers—in other words, family and friends of people who need care, who do it for nothing. However, it does not come as nothing for them: in many cases, they will have had to give up, quite possibly, well-paid jobs because they cannot combine really good careers, and all that they involve, with caring on a day-to-day basis. It is not necessarily that they were unskilled or low-paid workers themselves, and, therefore, the sacrifice from them is very much greater. I do not think that this has ever been recognised.

I would be interested to know what the cost would be if we paid even the minimum wage to all those unpaid carers; we might then get a much better idea of the valuable service that they provide. We should take far more care of them, giving them some respite care in particular—because I feel that many of them get to the end of their tether. If they could just have a nice little break, it would permit them to go on, whereas, in other circumstances, they break completely. I hope that this will be the end of the pussyfooting of various Governments and that we actually get on and do something for the social care sector.