Health and Care Bill

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 4th February 2022 Lords Chamber

I think it is time that we looked carefully at the requirements placed on care home operators. The need for transparency is important. I do not have a problem with offshore companies that make profits if they offer good services, or with private equity and hedge funds that deliver good returns to their shareholders. However, I do have a problem if those companies are taking advantage of some of the most vulnerable people in our society without proper oversight or controls. For example, in the case of Four Seasons, once the company was on the verge of collapse the CQC’s only option was to close it down, which is the last thing you would want it to, and, when the restructuring occurred, there was no ability for the regulator to insist on equity financing, so we still have very heavily debt-laden companies in an environment, of course, where interest rates are heading upwards. So I urge the Minister to consider this carefully before Report. I hope that we can introduce some proper controls. I will be looking to try to bring this back on Report.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I will take to heart the strictures of the Government Chief Whip and see whether I can speak in a minute without repetition. Way back in the 1970s, I was chair of social services in Sheffield, at a time when all residential care was under the auspices of the local authority. We then believed that what we were doing was in the interests of the people being cared for, the families that required support and the care workers. I want to make a very simple point: as well as the taxpayer being exploited, as well as those being cared for being exploited, we are also seeing the exploitation of workers on the lowest possible pay whom we are desperately trying to recruit, and we owe it to all those people to get this right.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend Lord Blunkett for speaking very briefly and giving us some very wise words. The noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, is absolutely right that the system is inadequate. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for tabling these amendments and opening up this discussion. They address the issue of ownership of the organisations that provide social care. We know that almost all social care provision, residential and domiciliary, is not in the public sector and has not been for some time. We also know that the current system is wholly dysfunctional, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Brinton, said. It does not work for the service users, for the staff or even for the providers, which go bust fairly regularly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, described. Of course, it used to be a money spinner for hedge funds and others that got involved to asset strip and leverage profits and remuneration at the expense of service users, both individual self-funders and taxpayers and ratepayers who were paying for other residents.

I have always taken the view that this sector would benefit from an enormous influx of social enterprises and co-operatives. Where social care, domiciliary care and residential care are provided through social enterprises, community enterprises and co-operatives, they are sustainable, they keep their staff and they invest their surpluses back into their social purpose, so everybody gains. To suggest that the Government will fix social care through this legislation is laughable, because the existing market solution cannot be fixed. So we have sympathy with these amendments and fully understand the intent that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, outlined for us.

I am interested to know how the Minister will respond, because it is quite clear that something must happen in this sector because it is so unsatisfactory. I suspect that if the Government are not going to move on this, we may have to return to this later in the Bill.