Adult Social Care in England

Lord O'Shaughnessy Excerpts

Tuesday 10th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask a Question of which I have given private notice.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Lord O'Shaughnessy) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are committed to improving the quality and availability of adult social care in England. That is why we passed the Care Act in 2014 to provide for the first time a national eligibility threshold for care. It is why we are investing £2 billion more in social care provision over the next three years and have plans to reform how care is funded for the long term.

[Baroness Bakewell]

My Lords, the situation in social care is deteriorating and the Government’s strategy to handle the challenge is inadequate. The situation is getting worse because of the fundamental change in the demographic of this country. Some 15,000 people are now 100 years old, and the size of that cohort is increasing. Surgeries are closing, hospitals are inadequate, and 1.2 million people are unpaid carers and themselves over the age of 65. This calls for a radical, fundamental response, rather than the usual Green Paper and sums of money. That is not enough. This country faces a crisis of demographic change.

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I agree in part with what the noble Baroness said in the sense that demographic change represents a big challenge. She mentioned the over-100s. The population of over-85s will double between now and 2037. As the CQC report makes clear, many of those people will have difficulty with the basic behaviours and actions they need to be able to live independently. That is the big challenge that we face. The report provides a very honest exposure of strengths and weaknesses in the current system. The strengths are there, though the noble Baroness perhaps did not give them as much credit as they deserve. The report says:

“Overall, the quality of care remains relatively stable, with the majority of all care rated as good and improvements in some services”.


Indeed, only 1% of services are rated inadequate. Clearly we want that percentage to be zero but it is better than in other sectors. I do not disagree with the noble Baroness about the demographic challenges we face. As I said in my first Answer, we are trying to put more funding in, to recruit more staff and raise quality now that we have this national threshold. We hope to decrease variation and then look for a long-term solution that will solve this problem that we have all been wandering around for the last 20 years.

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, as a care provider for the last 17 years I say humbly to my noble friend that we need to pay care staff a proper wage so that they can actually have a life that is not just about existing. I am told constantly that local councils are being given extra funding. It is not trickling down to the providers and there needs to be a really serious look at the level of funding and at what we are entitled to pay care staff, because with Brexit around the corner we are going to need ever more of our own homegrown talent to provide those places.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

The noble Baroness speaks from experience here. On the point about paying care staff, one of the greatest beneficiaries from the new national living wage are and will be care staff. That will increase over time and is one of the reasons why increased funding needs to go into the system. She also talks about the interface with local authorities. She will know that it is a very fluid market, with providers registering and deregistering all the time. We are trying to make sure that there is a proper review of the quality of the interface between local authorities and the National Health Service. Some do it very well, with very few delayed transfers, while others have huge problems. We get people in beds who should be in a care setting, either in a nursing home, in community care or at home. Those reviews are taking place and should highlight some practice that is not good enough. The challenge will be to work with those councils to make sure they do something about it.

[Lord Warner (CB)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that the CQC has drawn attention to the loss of 4,000 nursing home beds in the last year? Does he accept that this is a loss that the NHS could do without? What action are the Government taking to increase the number of nursing home beds in this country?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

The noble Lord is quite right that the CQC report highlights that. It also highlights a broadly stable residential care home situation. What is changing the nature of care provision is the increase in the amount of domiciliary and community-based care that is being provided; we are seeing a shift there. The CQC report also shows big discrepancies across the country in terms of the proportion of beds per head of population. That is one thing we are trying to address, to make sure there is much more evenness of care.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, the CQC report emphasised the need to co-ordinate care by stating that in future it will report not only on the quality of care in individual providers but on the quality of co-ordination between services. It quotes examples of services working together using technology and innovation to share data and improve care. How do the Government plan to encourage this approach? Will they look at funding models to make sure that they encourage co-ordination rather than deter people from co-ordinating?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

The noble Baroness makes an excellent point. We will certainly look at those funding models. Co-ordination, as we have been saying, is the way forward, because if you are a user of care in your eighties, you may be visiting a GP, you may be based in a nursing home, and to you, it ought to be one system and you ought to be travelling through it smoothly. Of course, we know that that is not the case at the moment, and the noble Baroness is quite right to highlight that there are great gains to be made, whether from having pharmacists in nursing homes or from having GPs coming to visit. Her point about technology and data is a good one. We still have an argument to win in reassuring people that their data are safe within the NHS so that they can be confident that they are used wisely for their direct care. That is the policy area I am now responsible for, since the election, so I am focused on providing that reassurance so that we can unlock the kind of innovation she is talking about.

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, is the Minister able to give us any idea about when we may see the Green Paper for which some of us feel we have been waiting 40 years? Will it contain any revisiting of the Government’s response to the so-called Dilnot proposals about a cap on social care costs, about which there was so much confusion in the general election?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I am sorry to disappoint the noble Baroness but I am not able to give her any more details on the timing of the consultation.

[Lord Bichard (CB)]

Will the Minister reassure the House that the long-delayed Green Paper will address not just resources but some of the other points that have already been raised, and maybe one or two others? For example, how do we recruit, retain and motivate a high-quality workforce? How do we provide urgent support for many small providers, which are struggling to survive, let alone improve the quality of the service? How do we make use of the digital potential that exists, which is currently not being realised? How do we get a real integration of health and social care services around the client? Will he reassure the House that these issues will be addressed explicitly?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

The consultation is looking primarily at the funding situation but in doing so it will have to consider the shape of the market and making sure that the whole system is put on a sustainable basis for the future, which obviously will involve looking at some of the issues the noble Lord has highlighted.

[Baroness Manzoor (Con)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the Government on making £2 billion available to social care. That is very welcome, but there is great variation in social care across the country which needs to be tackled, as well as the need to focus and co-ordinate services between acute and social care. Can my noble friend the Minister say exactly how NHS England will be helped to ensure that this is tackled quite urgently?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

The noble Baroness is quite right. In social care and the delayed transfers of care from hospitals, there is a huge amount of variation across the country. The additional money that was announced in the Budget comes with a variety of conditions, which has not been the case previously. One of these is to reduce the amount of variation in the quality of services available from local authority to local authority. For the first time, a set of reviews is taking place of local authorities—some of which will be facing challenges, others will not yet be—to make sure that that interface between the NHS and social care, which is one of the big problems where the system falls down, is looked at; that people are moving forward smoothly; that money is crossing those silos; and that the kind of service being provided is joined up and is actually providing for the needs of the people affected.