Covid-19: Social Care Services

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, for enabling us to hold this debate. I will concentrate on: emergency planning and procurement; the overall impact of government policies on the social care sector, which Age UK said last week was “an unfolding disaster”; and the lack of integration of health and social care. I declare that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

Local government has mostly done a very good job in providing community leadership and supporting vulnerable people in this pandemic, but I am puzzled as to why our emergency and resilience planning generally has not worked well. It seems to result from the Government’s failure to plan effectively for a pandemic since 2016, despite advice which identified PPE shortages as a major risk; the lack of action in February to treat the pandemic as seriously as other countries were; and the Government’s policy of running a centralised procurement and distribution system, which has ended up with shortages of essential equipment.

I draw two lessons from this. First, a country of our size cannot be run out of Whitehall or its centralised agencies. We should learn from Germany, where more responsibility lies at regional and local level for procurement, and for testing, tracing and isolating. We need to be far more resilient as a country by manufacturing more ourselves. The international shortage of PPE has impacted directly on care homes, where deaths have soared.

The Government seem to have had no plan for the care sector. They should not have been surprised that PPE would be needed by so many organisations outside the NHS, nor should they have been surprised by the need to test; yet by Easter Monday only 505 social care workers had been tested, compared with 48,000 tests for NHS staff. As we have heard, the location of testing centres has meant that many on low incomes have had to travel unacceptably long distances for testing.

Despite the title the Department of Health and Social Care, the care sector seems the poor relation. We need a fully integrated National Health and Care Service. We have voluntary integration in only one-third of England. There are 430,000 residents in nursing and residential homes, with care fragmented between the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. The financial situation for many of those homes is dire, as we have heard. Reform of the financial structure of social care is urgently needed and it really is time for the Government to provide the necessary leadership to start to solve this huge problem. I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in this debate.