Health and Social Care Levy Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

2nd reading & Order of Commitment discharged & 3rd reading
Monday 11th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, it is with some trepidation that I add my voice to those who have spoken already on this matter. Some of the speeches will live with me for a very long time, in the way that the case has been put and the evidence put forward, and it seems almost recondite for someone like me to add to the detail. I want to come at it from the point of view of social care but also, perhaps existentially, from my experience with MHA—Methodist Homes for the Aged—the largest charity care provider in the country, which has been doing it for 75 years. It has 70 residential homes scattered across the country, looking after 4,400 people. Three thousand people are being helped to live in their communities, with staffing and support people to do that, and 11,000 in their own homes. MHA has 7,000 staff and 3,750 volunteers. As the cream on top of the milk, it is one of the leading exponents, in such institutions, of music therapy—just to indicate that all is not simply bread and butter.

It has to be said that seeking some guidance from MHA on what it has felt about what has been happening on the ground in the communities that it cares for is what gives me a sense of wanting to contribute to this debate. Things have been dire. Let us look, first of all, at the last 18 months—or whatever it is—since Covid started and see how it has affected the care system in general. If all goes well and things are better than we think and expect, we are talking about waiting two years before a certain amount of money might come into the system and be addressed to social care. The last 18 months have taken so much out of those providing social care that any talk of sustainability begs the question: sustaining what? Things have been dire. A 95% increase in insurance has had to be borne as a result of the pandemic, £2 million per year was needed to purchase PPE, there has been staff sickness, overtime, bank agency staff, restricted movement between care homes and so and so forth. Care homes have barely managed to hold the show together under the pressures that they have been feeling in these last 18 months. So when the Prime Minister got up and made the announcement he did—and we all hope there will be however many millions it is in two years’ time—we have to ask ourselves, “What about now? What about repairing the damage that has just been done and is still being suffered?”

The thought that the mandatory vaccination status for care home staff which is not required in the health service could see a labour shift from care homes to hospitals seems really rather perverse. We simply have to recognise that many of the care institutions that we are talking about are in a dire, dire state. There is a dependency and a relationship between them and the local authorities that are being looked to, to anchor the proposals that are being made. MHA has contacted local authorities to see how to take advantage of the £3.2 billion that was given to local authorities to respond to Covid-19 pressures. Of the 188 local authorities that it works with, only 5% gave a 10% increase, there was a smaller uplift from 35% of local authorities, and 60% gave no uplift at all. You just wonder how much of this money that was supposed, through local authorities, to improve the situation financially for social care got to the front line. The conclusion from MHA is that almost none at all got there.

We also have the whole question of recruiting and retention. On this workforce business, perhaps if there are any HGV drivers who are surplus to requirement now that we are training them all ourselves and producing them for supply chains and all the rest of it, we could get them qualified to work in our care homes, because there is a desperate need. Across social care, so many years of low pay have been compounded by valued staff leaving, due—as I say—to Brexit and exhaustion from the pandemic, and now some staff leaving and moving to the NHS, as I have suggested.

The last 18 months have left the social care sector in dire straits. The next two years—until whatever, if anything, filters through from the latest arrangements—will have to be survived. Clearly, from the evidence I have been adducing, local authorities are not in a position to play their part. Frankly, to talk about the future of the social care sector seems redundant; survival is the very first thing, as well as a carefully thought-through policy. We have heard so many hints of good ideas that have been in circulation in cross-party committees which have worked on these issues. Therefore, this little piece of legislation seems tawdry.

I hope the Minister will recognise that, lovely man as he is, we want him to be the channel through whom we declare our displeasure to the Government he serves.