Covid-19: Social Care Services

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Wheeler for securing this debate and for her excellent introduction. I want to talk about the financial circumstances of care workers, especially when they get sick. Care workers are on the front line doing important work in highly risky conditions, usually for the minimum wage, but what happens if they get sick?

Let us look at two circumstances. The first is a carer working in a care home for 35 hours a week on the minimum wage taking home about £277 a week. If she develops symptoms and has to self-isolate, the good news is that she qualifies for statutory sick pay. The bad news is that SSP is just £95 per week, so overnight her net income falls by two-thirds. Can the Minister tell the House how she is meant to manage? Can she apply for universal credit to top up her SSP? That is not made clear in any of the Government’s web pages.

The second example is someone caring for a number of people in their own homes and travelling between them. She works for two different employers but does not earn enough in either job to qualify for SSP. If she needs to self-isolate, she would have to claim universal credit, but how long would that take? The last figures published for universal credit showed on average 40,000 people a week claiming the benefit, but in the past month 1.4 million people have applied, so can the Minister tell the House what the average wait is for someone who has applied for universal credit in the past month? Secondly, even if our care worker’s claim is processed quickly, there is a built-in wait of five weeks to get money on universal credit. She can ask for an advance, but it is a loan deducted from future universal credit payments. She is only just managing as it is and is scared of getting into debt.

Ministers have made some welcome changes to universal credit, but these case studies show that carers need more. We need action on the two-child limit, the savings threshold and the failure to uplift legacy benefits. Most urgently I want to plead again with Minsters to abolish the five-week wait in universal credit. If they cannot or will not do that, will they give everyone an advance automatically when they apply, but as a grant, not a loan?

These may not sound like health issues, but their effects really are, because if carers cannot pay their rent and feed their families they may feel that they have no choice but to carry on working when they should be self-isolating. That is bad for carers, but also, since their work takes them from one person to another, they must be at serious risk of spreading the virus to some of the most vulnerable people in our country. I urge Ministers to act now.