Social Care

Lord Polak Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Polak (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. I learned so much from her. It was also an honour to have served on the Adult Social Care Committee under the expert chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and I also pay tribute to the excellent support staff that we had. When I joined the committee, I thought it would be an important learning experience in an area that I was not particularly familiar with. However, as we met and listened to witnesses, it became apparent that this was not an academic exercise but, sadly, a practical guide for me and my family, as it is in one way or another for every family in the country.

I will concentrate on just one area of the report, on page 45 with the heading “Navigating the social care system: a constant fight”. Paragraph 147 states:

“Whether it is trying to get support for themselves or for the person they provide care for, unpaid carers often find that they are left to their own devices when it comes to navigating the adult social care system”.


As stated in our report, witnesses found it difficult to organise formal support for the person they care for.

Because of the difficulty of accessing care and support, social workers and local authorities are seen as gatekeepers, and there is little trust in the system’s ability or willingness to provide help. How sad, as my noble friend Lady Fraser said, that some unpaid carers told us that they live in fear of assessments which they see as a process designed to minimise their needs so as to deny them support.

I totally understand. My mother is suffering from brain cancer and has 24/7 care at home in Liverpool. We have experienced, and are experiencing, both some of the best and the worst that the system has to offer. On the positive side, the care and attention of the Marie Curie Hospice in Woolton, Liverpool, led by the deeply sensitive and professional palliative care doctor Dr Mark Mills and his team, has been exemplary. While mum is at home, the staff at the hospice have been an enormous comfort and help, not just to my mum but to my sister and brother too.

On the other hand, the experience we have had with the local authority assessors has been woeful. On 9 February, my mother was assessed by a nurse via Zoom. The nurse was in Kent and my mother was over 200 miles away, unable to communicate, in her bed in Liverpool. The assessment was to decide what the immediate next step for her care plan should be. The report, compiled by a nurse who has never met my mother, was then to be sent to an unknown panel of people who also have never met her to decide the best course of treatment and care. This absurd assessment was executed over a three-hour Zoom call seven weeks ago, and as I stand here today, we have heard nothing. The system is sadly broken. As we speak, we should consider that people up and down the country are battling to understand an incomprehensible system at the same time as trying to care for their loved ones as best they can.

During the committee’s deliberations, we understood that we were not going to be able to change a system that desperately needs an overhaul, but we were attempting to move the dial a little to bring some clarity to people doing their utmost to care. Our committee has made 36 recommendations, and that only scratches the surface. Each one is important. My own experiences have made me think more carefully, for example, about the point forcefully and powerfully made by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, about people without children ageing. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, I urge my noble friend the Minister to look carefully at recommendation 9, where we ask the Government to establish a commissioner for care to bring about a more accessible adult social care system. I concur with the suggested actions on page 45 of the Archbishops’ report that assessment and budget planning should be simple and consistent, and that care planning services should be focused on what matters to people.

I appeal across this House to all parties and to none to help that commissioner to take the politics out of care. We must come together to find and implement an urgent solution so that people up and down the country can fulfil with dignity what the late Lord Sacks wrote in his book Celebrating Life—that the supreme act of caring is to make a difference to someone else’s life. In his book the Dignity of Difference, he said, “To care is to look into the face of the other and see their uniqueness, their vulnerability and their pain”.