Older People’s Housing Taskforce
Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Baroness makes an important point. As I said, the task force report was published two weeks ago, and we are looking at each of its 44 recommendations to make sure that our housing needs are diverse for the country. It is in the national interest that the Government ensure that we have housing that reflects the country and that we take into account the needs of people of all backgrounds and all ages.
Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)
My Lords, in considering the housing needs of older people, is the Minister mindful that many older people are also caring? It is not at all uncommon for people in their 70s to be caring for people in their 90s, or for people in their 80s to be caring for older adult children with special needs. Will these responsibilities of older people also be considered when looking at housing needs?
Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend makes a very important point. On carers, the Government are committed to ensuring that families have the support that they need. I want to ensure that people who care for family and friends are better able to look after their own health and well-being. The Department for Work and Pensions announced its intention to bring forward an independent review of the issue of overpayment of carer’s allowance in cases where earnings have exceeded the entitlement threshold. The Government are committed to reviewing the implementation of carer’s leave and examining the benefits of introducing paid carer’s leave.
Social Care Strategy
Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure and honour to welcome my noble friend Lady Keeley to your Lordships’ House and to be the first to congratulate her on her marvellous maiden speech. As your Lordships have heard, we have worked together on these issues for some years and I thank her for her kind tribute.
Time does not permit me to do justice to the great experience, expertise and wisdom that she brings to your Lordships’ House. As noble Lords have heard, she was first elected to the House of Commons in 2005, as the first ever woman MP for the Worsley constituency, which later changed its name to Worsley and Eccles South. She served as chair of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party and held government jobs in the Treasury and as deputy leader of the Commons. In opposition, she has held an impressive variety of shadow Minister posts. Her last, as your Lordships heard, was as shadow Minister of Culture, Media and Sport, where she championed music and tourism, and worked closely with the voluntary sector as shadow Minister for Civil Society. She combined all this with close attention to her constituency and an active role in local issues, much admired by all her constituents. She begins another phase of her public service today in this House, where I know she will be a valued and valuable Member.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler—whom I always want to call my noble friend—for her very welcome debate. I hope that she and other noble Lords will forgive me for a little trip down memory lane. I remember the many social care debates in which I have taken part in your Lordships’ House when it was very difficult to assemble a reasonable speakers list—far from the distinguished gathering that we have today. So few were those noble Lords interested in or concerned about the subject that I used to refer to them, as I have been reminded, as “the usual suspects”. Happily, the number of suspects has greatly increased today. In those days, it was also difficult to get detailed briefings; we have come a long way, with the raft of excellent material that we have from many sources today.
Your Lordships will not be surprised to know that I am especially grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, for including unpaid carers in her Motion. Going again down memory lane, I remind your Lordships that, when I became involved in the carers movement in the 1980s, the word “carer” was not in the Oxford English Dictionary and spell-check always changed it to “career”. When I went to collect my gong at the palace in 1993, my citation was announced as “for services to careers”. We have come a long way since then.
Carers are central to legislation now and some individual bits of legislation are aimed at them specifically. Even spell-check has caught up. However, I met a carer at a drop-in this week who told me that she feels completely rubbed out by a system that makes her fight for the slightest assessment of her own needs, despite that being enshrined in legislation since 1995, as we have heard, and strengthened in the Care Act 2014. Another told me of her struggles with mental health as a direct result of all the caring stress.
Your Lordships all know what needs to be done. We cannot fix the NHS without fixing social care. We must shift resources from hospital to the community. We must focus on prevention and early intervention. We must find a way to share the risk so that catastrophic care costs do not fall in an unfair way. We have known all this for years but, above all, we must understand that you cannot fix social care without supporting the main providers of social care: not staff, care homes or care workers but the unpaid carers, who are there all the time, providing £162 billion a year, as the value of their care, to individuals in need—often at terrible cost to their own mental and physical health, not to mention their finances. If they withdrew their labour or worked to rule, they would get more attention, but they are not going to do that because they are motivated by love, duty or a combination of both.
As the All-Party Group on Carers, which I had the honour to chair, so forcefully said, carers’ problems can be addressed by developing a new national carers strategy, which would set a clear direction of travel and a long-term vision for how carers can be supported, look at the interaction between different policies and departments and ensure that their needs are recognised and responded to at the highest levels of government.
It is 16 years since the last national strategy was developed, led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Surely it is time for another. If not now, when? The problem is going to get only more acute as our population ages and lives with increasing comorbidities. As the increased interest in this once-neglected subject shows, this is not someone else’s problem. We are all—every one of us—a hair’s breadth, a fall, or an accident away from being cared for or being a carer. As we have heard, there is a strong economic case for supporting carers. The Government need the will and determination to do it, but the rewards will be ample, for not only 6 million carers but every one of us.