Social Care Workers

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Wednesday 7th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes her point extremely well. We want social care to be a profession that people seek out, where they seek professional development and where they can find a fulfilling lifetime career. That will not be true for everyone, but we need a backbone of people who are committed to social care. That is why we have massively increased the funding to local authorities so that they can address the challenge of social care, and why we have published the adult social care coronavirus winter plan in order to provide short-term support for local authorities to achieve exactly what the noble Baroness has spelled out.

[The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)]

Short supplementaries, please.

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, when there is a shortage of care workers, as there clearly is, the need for care does not go away; it simply falls disproportionately on the families and neighbours—the unpaid carers. Some 70% of these say that they have had to give more care than previously during the pandemic, with an average of 10 hours extra a week. How will these extra burdens on unpaid carers be recognised and supported both in the long-term plan and in social care reform, when we eventually get it?

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[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful for the noble Lord’s recommendation. The project that he describes is incredibly interesting. I am not aware of it today, but I will definitely seek it out and try to find out more. I emphasise the broader point that the noble Lord is making: fresh thinking, digital innovation and the work of entrepreneurs to try to create new ways of working—to pool, for instance, the efforts of teams of people and to use platforms like the one that he describes—can make a massive difference in the area of social care. We are very supportive of digital entrepreneurs bringing fresh thinking to this important area of work.

[The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)]

My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has now elapsed. ‘