Housing Benefit

Debate between Andrew George and Baroness Keeley

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Andrew George]

I will not give way again on that point.

The debate has thus far largely focused on talking about a ghetto—or, rather, reservation—of people who live in social rented accommodation. It is, however, important to place this debate in the context of the way in which the whole housing market works and the important role social housing plays in relation to that.

In my constituency, many properties are sold as recreational investments to wealthy investors to be used as a second home or holiday home. Meanwhile, some hard-working, low-paid families will be evicted from their council houses because the Government believe they have one more bedroom than they deserve. I voted against this policy previously and my opposition to it is, if anything, even stronger now that I have met many of my constituents who are affected by it.

This policy will not increase the stock of desperately needed affordable homes for local people. The spare room penalty or bedroom tax victimises the most marginalised in our communities, undermines family life, penalises the hard-working low-paid for being prepared to stomach low-paid work, and masks the excessive cost and disruption to the disabled who have to move from expensively adapted homes. It is, in my view, Dickensian in its social divisiveness. It is an immoral policy.

[Barbara Keeley]

The hon. Gentleman is making a good speech and I am glad he will vote with us tonight. Does he agree that one of the most vindictive aspects of this policy is the way it penalises carers? I have mentioned the Carers UK research on how carers are being affected. It found that among the households affected, one in six carers—people who cannot get more hours of work because they have given up their jobs to care—had rent arrears and faced possible evictions.

[Andrew George]

The hon. Lady makes a very good point. I think this policy has been introduced in such a headlong rush that some of the inconsistencies and consequences have not been thought through carefully enough. The issue has been approached from entirely the wrong angle. If there is a problem with the housing stock, it is wrong that people in the social housing sector who are apparently over-housed should, in effect, be blamed by people elsewhere in the local community who are rather under-housed. They are being blamed for the effects of the failure of successive Governments to build enough affordable homes of sufficient size to give communities the flexibility to be able to ensure that local families have accommodation of adequate size and to meet the range of needs that exist.

The Liberal Democrats have proposed a mansion tax. That has been opposed by some people with large mansions who are quite happy to impose a bedroom tax on people who are clearly going to be severely affected by that. Furthermore, in rural areas like mine, many of the people who are affected and who are prepared to uproot themselves and move—in many cases from long-standing family homes to a smaller property—cannot find a property within 20, 30, 40 and sometimes 50 miles. In order for many rural areas to be able to comply with this policy, people have to uproot themselves from their community and place of work, their children’s schooling, their church, and their social and family networks—from everything—and go to alien places. Even in Cornwall there are places which many Cornish folk would find alien to them. That is the only option for them, however, other than having to face extremely penal charges in order to carry on living in their current home.

I was involved in building affordable homes for local people before I was elected to this place. We tried to introduce new schemes with sufficient three and four-bedroom accommodation to ensure that the community would in future have the flexibility to meet the range of needs that might arise. That was important because these properties would be available for decades. This tax will discourage housing associations and others who want to build housing in years to come from making sure they build a broad range of properties and thereby provide the flexibility to meet future needs. They will instead build smaller properties, which will result in increased overcrowding in future. If we go in that direction, we will end up with further ghettos. The ghettos of the future will be built as a result of this policy. That will be the consequence of going forward on this basis. If this policy is not based on a prejudice in respect of some of those who are marginalised, many of whom do not vote, I am sorry to say that it is based on an indifference to the most vulnerable families in our communities.

Adult Social Care

Debate between Andrew George and Baroness Keeley

Thursday 8th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

May I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) on leading the debate and on the way in which she has just opened it? It is good to work with her on the all-party group on social care. In debates such as this we work together to ensure that social care receives the focus that it needs to have in the House.

I want to discuss two aspects of the future of social care. The first is the current crisis in care and the need to bring in extra resources to close the funding gap. The second is the recommendations of the Dilnot report, which the hon. Lady has already touched on, which mainly focused on dealing with the catastrophic cost of sustained high-level care and support.

On the funding gap, the Minister told me and the Health Select Committee recently:

“We don’t accept the position that there is a gap. We have closed that gap in the spending review.”

However, Age UK’s “Care in Crisis” report says:

“This year spending on older people’s social care in England has fallen by £500 million and the funding gap is growing. … We project that by 2011-13 the Government would need to spend £1 billion more than this year to stop the situation getting any worse. … The current system is at breaking point.”

Research by Age UK showed that 82% of local authorities now provides care only to those with substantial or critical needs. Fewer than one in five local councils still provide care for those with moderate needs. I have to say I am happy that that includes my own local authority of Salford.

The Economic and Social Research Council centre for population change has looked at the issue of unmet need for social care. It concludes that, regardless of the data source used,

“there is significant unmet need for care among older people.”

For example, 66% of people aged over 65 who need help with bathing were not receiving any support. That figure was based on data from 2008 and since then we have had front-loaded cuts to local authority budgets. I am sure that, although there is no up-to-date estimate, there are greater levels of unmet need than the figure I have given.

The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services has reported £1 billion of cuts to adult social care budgets in 2010-11, with further cuts predicted for next year.

This week many of us were involved when about 1,000 campaigners and 60 organisations lobbied Parliament for the urgent reform of social care and an end to the care crisis. For the first time, thousands more who could not attend Parliament joined the lobby online. A statement from those care and support organisations to MPs and Ministers said:

“Our social care system is broken. It cannot cope with a rapidly ageing population and positive impact of people living longer with illness and disability. Those who use our social care system can no longer tolerate a social care system which leaves many with no support and others with poor quality services. The public are angry that they can face huge care charges and end up losing all their savings or being forced to sell their home.”

One of the 1,000 people who came to Parliament to lobby MPs was a deaf-blind woman from Manchester who got up at 5 am to travel down because she said she was so worried about the future of social care. The Care and Support Alliance said that MPs heard personal experiences from people who need care but are receiving none, disabled people unable to access the support needed to live independently, families paying huge bills for care and carers pushed to breaking point.

I wanted to test the situation in my local area before the debate. Over the past few days I checked with three organisations that support older people and carers in Salford and the neighbouring area in Greater Manchester. This drew a depressing but familiar picture of services worsening, mainly due to budget cuts, but also due to cuts and organisational changes brought about by the NHS reforms. A staff member at Parkinson’s UK in Greater Manchester told me about her clients, people who have worked hard all their lives but are now struggling to pay for services that are essential to them. In some cases she had to apply for grants to help people with Parkinson’s buy a profiling bed or even pay off debts.

The staff member told me about a couple struggling to pay for the care needed by the husband, who has Parkinson’s. To help get him out of bed and dressed costs £22 an hour, and having someone sit with him while his wife does the shopping costs £11 an hour. Another carer of someone with Parkinson’s and dementia had her respite care cut from two weeks a year to one week. She feels that she cannot cope without those two weeks of respite. The staff member also told me that budget cuts mean that people with Parkinson’s can wait for a year for a stair lift, and she knows one man who has to go to bed at 7 pm because later in the evening his mobility gets worse and he cannot manage the stairs.

The staff member also told me that NHS efficiency targets mean that GPs are switching to cheaper brands of drugs for patients with Parkinson’s, but many of these are less effective. One person she told me about was admitted to hospital after becoming ill following a switch to a cheaper, less-effective medicine. The hospital staff had told her to “be firm with her GP” and insist on the more expensive brand. We have to be realistic that that is a difficult thing to do. NHS budget cuts in the local area have meant the loss of the community matron service, a service that was used by Parkinson’s UK staff for many of their clients but has now ended. In Salford—I have raised this point before—the primary care trust ended the pilot of active case management for people with long-term conditions, which was proving popular and effective.

Locally, Age Concern has told me that it has now lost the funding for a “Friends for Life” pilot scheme, which was part of the national dementia strategy. Its dementia support service has a planned income reduction of 40% over three years. It has had to make seven staff redundant and reduce its dementia support. Funding for day centres is being reduced by one fifth and will then be ended owing to the switch to direct payments from individual budgets. We all support personalisation and individual budgets, but not if it is a cover for cuts. I was disturbed to hear of a couple of cases where that is happening. In one case I was told about, a carer who had previously had two hours of respite care was given a budget of £9 and told, “Do what you want with the money.”

Our carers’ centre manager in Salford told me of her own experience of such cuts, this time to the personal budget of a family member she cares for with a learning disability who lives in Sheffield. Following what she described as a “fairly perfunctory” re-assessment that was done solely with the person with the learning disability, with no input from a carer or guardian—that is an important point—the personal budget was cut by £10,000. In that case, the carers’ centre manager was able to lodge a complaint and get legal help from a community care lawyer, but she knows that such an intervention would not be possible for other carers. These examples are what we mean when we talk about a care system in crisis.

However, those are not the worst examples. As I mentioned earlier, we know that some 800,000 older people are left without basic care. They have been described as

“lonely, isolated and at risk”.

Those are the words of 60 experts in social care in their recent letter asking the Government to make social care reform a top priority. We therefore know that the problem of unmet need is getting worse. Much of the additional burden will fall on unpaid family carers, many of whom are already overburdened. Statistics from the NHS Information Centre show that the proportion of carers providing more than 50 hours a week has doubled in the past 10 years. I think that that is the level at which it can be counted as a 24/7 caring job, as was discussed by the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod).

Many organisations have sent us briefings for this debate. There is a consistent call for a solution to the care crisis. Carers UK calls for the capped costs model that the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth talked about. It sees a cap on costs as essential. It favours the cap being set at £35,000, which it feels would give carers and families the ability to plan for care arrangements and costs, and provide an opportunity for the development of care insurance products. I agree with that assessment and would caution against setting the cap at a higher level, such as £60,000, which has been discussed in the media. That is the value of some properties in Salford, so it could mean a family losing the entire value of their home, which would be wrong.

Carers UK believes that if families know that costs will be capped, they might be more willing to buy care and support earlier. That would help to promote independence and reduce the pressure on carers, which can result in ill health, giving up work or reducing working hours. It is thought that it will be harder to produce that shift in behaviour and move towards a new market in insurance products without a capped costs model.

Care and Support Alliance members argue for an additional £5 billion to be put aside over the next three years to meet the growing demand for social care. The cases that I have mentioned show that there is a clear need for additional resources to meet the growing demand, address the unmet need and tackle the shortfall in resources that has been growing for some years.

The Dilnot commission was given the task of making recommendations on how to achieve an affordable and sustainable funding system for care and support. Its report confirmed what has been said repeatedly for years: the current system is unfair and unsustainable, and without reform it will deliver ever-poorer outcomes for individuals and families. That includes the 1,000 people we saw here this week. The report also said that the funding of social care is inadequate and that people are not receiving the care and support that they need.

Although we may not have time to discuss this today—I certainly will not—the provision of advice and information is poor and very limited. People struggle to find financial information and advice, and there is little information and advice for carers. Worst of all—perhaps we can understand this—because the system is complex and difficult to understand, most people do not plan for, or even think about, the future care provision that they may need.

There is much consensus around the capped costs model. There is support for setting a cap at £35,000 and, as the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth mentioned, for setting an asset threshold for means-tested support at £100,000. There are other important aspects, such as the need for national eligibility criteria and the need for local authorities to meet the eligible needs of carers. I think that those points are equally important. What still needs to be discussed, and I am not sure whether we will get into it today, is how to pay for the capped costs model and the additional resources that are needed to close the funding gap.

Care and Support Alliance members believe that there is a public appetite for reform. I think that we must take the debate across the country and ensure that the issues and solutions that I have talked about start to be debated. I have spoken about social care issues for the past seven years and I believe that they are now well understood. The 60 organisations that have lobbied Parliament this week have been lobbying on these issues for many years. The people in those organisations and the people they represent are tired of being consulted on the future of social care. What they want is action.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

I congratulate my colleague on the Health Committee on her contribution to the report on social care. Does she agree that underlying the issue of care in crisis is an issue with the work force, who often work on the minimum income, are poorly regarded and are subjected to a lot of unfavourable reporting in the press? Does she think that we take them for granted when we look at the overall sector?

[Barbara Keeley]

Indeed, the work force issues are very important. I will not have time to discuss them today, but perhaps other Members will. The things that we hear about, such as tasks being reduced to one-minute periods and visits being cut down to very short periods, must make it a distressing and difficult job. We also have to recognise that personalisation leads to people working in an isolated way. Whereas before they might have been part of a local authority work force, they are now individually employed by care agencies and may not see anyone else. There are some new issues for us to consider, including the one that the hon. Gentleman mentions.

In 2009, after much consultation, my party brought forward plans to establish a national care service. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State knows, Labour’s proposals for funding social care were treated as a political football, and there were some regrettable political attacks on them during the general election. That was unfortunate, and we cannot allow it to continue. I congratulate him on going back into the cross-party talks with great willingness, which must have been difficult knowing what happened to him during the election. We must work to achieve consensus across parties and across the country, because the issues that I have mentioned are becoming more pressing than ever before.

I believe I have found a unique way to link two speeches today, both of which you have heard, Madam Deputy Speaker. I talked earlier about women in sport, and this Sunday I will be running in a 10 km race to raise funds for Age UK’s “Spread the Warmth” campaign, which is aimed at making life better for older people in winter and avoiding needless deaths from the cold.

NHS Care of Older People

Debate between Andrew George and Baroness Keeley

Thursday 27th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[Barbara Keeley]

Indeed. I do not distance myself in any way from the excellent point the hon. Member for Stourbridge made in opening the debate: this is about leadership, management, training and accountability, all of which failed in the case I have outlined.

[Andrew George]

The hon. Lady is making a strong case. On the point about whistleblowing, or protected disclosure, her own research may have shown that when a nurse, for example, suggests to senior management that there is a resource problem on a ward, that does not necessarily enhance their likelihood of improving their job prospects in the hospital. Often, they are told, “Other members of staff seem to manage, so why don’t you?” Does the hon. Lady agree that we need to look at how whistleblowing can be done safely?