A Plan for the NHS and Social Care

Angela Rayner Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner (Ashton-under-Lyne) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to close today’s debate and to hear from many hon. Members across the House, including two excellent maiden speeches. The hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Anum Qaisar-Javed) was a teacher of politics, and I am sure that she will continue to give us all a schooling in the Chamber when she stands up for her constituents as she did today. Even as a granny, I cannot match the lifetime of commitment to politics shown by the hon. Member for Aberconwy (Robin Millar). We have been on opposite sides of the many campaigns that he has fought, but his love of Wales and the beautiful coastline of his constituency are sentiments that I am sure the whole House will share.

Let me add my voice to those of hon. Members on both sides of the House who have reflected on the role that key workers have played throughout this crisis. I want especially to mention those who work now—as I once did myself—in social care. They have worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic. Too often, they became ill themselves, and some tragically paid with their lives for keeping our public services running.

When the Prime Minister took office, he told us that he had already prepared a plan for social care. Two years later, this Queen’s Speech offered just nine words and the promise that proposals would be “brought forward”. So much for that prepared plan. For the 11 years that the Conservative party has been in power, care workers have been given only the promise of jam tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes. In the meantime, the problems facing the sector have only been worsened by the crisis that our health and social care services face.

As a union rep in social care, I saw at first hand the success of the then Labour Government’s delivering the workforce programme. By working together, we improved the quality of care, increased pay for staff, and reduced hospitalisation and ultimately, therefore, the cost to the taxpayer. It is a false economy not to ensure that people can live as independently as possible in their own homes, with the right support at the right time and in the right place.

Today, however, the workers who were praised by everyone in this Chamber are underpaid and overworked, and that has consequences for us all. If only this Queen’s Speech had contained more than a vague promise of proposals and had a Bill to address that issue. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker) even tabled such a Bill in the last Session. Like other private Members’ Bills in the last Session, it fell not because the House rejected it, but because the Government removed parliamentary time.

If the Minister listens to just one thing I say tonight, I hope it will be my plea to make time in this Session for another such Bill, because the low-paid and insecure nature of employment in social care meant that many carers were not entitled to sick pay. That issue is at the heart of our response to the pandemic. There is simply no substitute for raising the level of sick pay and expanding coverage so that all carers can afford to self-isolate.

A healthier country rests on a healthier economy. That goes not just for workers in health and social care, but all workers. That is why we would have legislated for an immediate £10 an hour minimum wage, banned zero-hours contracts and granted full rights from day one, with entitlements to sick pay and annual leave.

We all remember the disgraceful scenes over the past year, when carers did not receive basic protection during the pandemic. Care workers had significantly higher rates of death, but there has not been a single prosecution of a single employer. The promised employment Bill was supposed to create a single enforcement body to protect health and safety and tackle exploitation at work. Perhaps the Minister can tell us why, in the face of a pandemic, tackling that has not been a priority.

The right hon. Members for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) and for Ashford (Damian Green) both spoke of the challenges of integrating social care and health. Let me remind them and others on the Government Benches that they have no mandate to privatise our NHS. The Conservatives have administered an £8 billion cut to social care budgets since 2010, yet they have made millions of pounds available to enforce voter ID as part of this Gracious Speech. If politics is the language of priorities, that says a lot. There was one case of voter personation fraud in 2019, out of the 59 million votes cast that year. The odds of me winning the national lottery are better, so why would the Government think that this crime is more urgent for new legislation than, for example, violence against women? My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) touched on that issue with her usual passion. I urge Ministers and Government Members to accept her amendment. We will support her in the Lobby if not.

Voting is safe and secure in Britain. Ministers should be ensuring confidence, instead of spreading baseless scare stories. The fact is that this measure will price some voters out of democracy. Millions of people lack voter ID in this country—in particular, older voters, low-income voters and black, Asian and ethnic minority voters. The Conservatives are reversing decades of democratic progress and urgently need to rethink the policy, because it is yet another example of a Government too focused on gimmicks and slogans, rather than real action.

The so-called levelling-up agenda is another such case. When the Prime Minister set up a business council in January, he promised it would level up opportunity for people and businesses across the UK, but just one of its 30 council members was based in the north of England and two in the midlands, while 25 were in London or its commuter zone. In March, the Industrial Strategy Council warned that the levelling-up agenda was unlikely to succeed because there was too much control from the centre. So what did the Prime Minister do? He set up another unit in Whitehall. A senior Cabinet Office official told the Financial Times that there was “widespread cluelessness” about what levelling up actually meant.

The Prime Minister promised that the Queen’s Speech would put “rocket fuel” into the levelling-up agenda, but no one seems to have told the Housing Minister or the Business Minister, who yesterday could not answer even the basic questions. They did not even know that a levelling-up taskforce existed—not so much a flagship as a ghost ship or, as one of the Prime Minister’s own advisers put it, a “slogan without a purpose”. If only the Government had looked over the Atlantic and drawn inspiration from this President and not the last. The Queen’s Speech could have included the £30 billion stimulus package proposed by the shadow Business Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), creating 400,000 new jobs in the industries of the future. It could have built on the lessons of a vaccine roll-out driven by an active interventionist state. Instead, the Government’s investment plan is absolutely tiny in comparison with that of President Biden.

The Queen’s Speech has no employment Bill, and the country will instead face an unemployment bill. Yesterday, the Paymaster General, the right hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), told the House that any criticism of Ministers’ many dodgy deals was anti-business, but I am afraid it is the Prime Minister who famously said exactly what he would like to do to business, and that is one promise that he has kept in the Gracious Address, because he has left business high and dry.

Across the country, small and medium-sized enterprises face a long road to recovery. For months, we have called for a comprehensive plan for British business with debt restructuring at its heart. Instead, we have a Bill that tinkers with state aid and that will leave us investing a fraction of the support that countries such as Germany or Denmark give to their industry.

Many Members across the House have mentioned mental health. We know that the pandemic has left our nation needing more support, and I hope that the Government will take inspiration from the Welsh Labour Government, who have put wellbeing at the heart of their nation.

We face a critical moment as a country. As life begins to return to normal, we are left asking if business as usual is really what we aim to return to. The pandemic has exposed the millions of insecure jobs, the key workers who are underpaid and undervalued even as we applaud them in the streets, the services that they provide collapsing under the strain and an economy that does not work for working people. Last October, the Prime Minister rightly summoned the spirit of our greatest post-war Government and promised to echo Attlee’s plan for a post-war new Jerusalem, but I am afraid he is no Clement Attlee.

This was the moment for our new economic and social settlement to tackle insecurity at work, to meet the climate crisis head-on, to rebuild our public services, to support our businesses and to share wealth and power fairly among our citizens and communities. The British people deserved a Queen’s Speech that met those challenges of the moment, but it has fallen short on every count. This granny knows that it is our grandchildren who will still be paying off the debt that has mounted up over this period. We owe it to them to offer them better-paid jobs, better real affordable homes and a better Government.