Care Homes: England

Debate between Anne Main and Anna Turley

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve again under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) for obtaining this important debate with his customary determination to tackle the big challenges of the day and his concern for the most vulnerable in society. As everyone on both sides of the House has agreed during the debate, older people deserve the right to live with dignity and decency; but, as has also been discussed, too often that is not the case, and I am afraid the situation seems set only to get worse.

Eighty-six per cent. of care home places are run by the private sector for profit. Local authorities are the largest single purchasers of those places across the country. Because of intense budgetary pressures, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) and my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) clearly explained, local authorities reduced their fees by an average of 5% between 2010-11 and 2015-16. According to the sector analysts LaingBuisson, the care home sector is closing more beds than it is opening for the first time since 2005, with a net loss of 3,000 across the UK last year. In the north-east we expect to have a substantial crisis in social care as a result of the Government’s failure to grip the issue.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Hove said, the homes most at risk are those dependent on residents paid for by local councils at rates far below those paid by self-funding residents: proprietors say rates are actually below break-even point. In the north-east, only 18% of people requiring care are self-paying, compared with 54% in the south-east. In Surrey, by contrast, only 1% of people in residential homes are paid for by the state.

The Financial Times has noticed that the care home market is highly polarised between lucrative self-pay homes, mostly in south-east England, and those with local authority residents, such as Redcar and Cleveland, which are struggling. Given that disparity between areas such as Surrey and areas such as mine, and since there is a crisis in the funding not of residential care but of state residential care, it is probable that the market will not collapse nationally, but will fall over in areas such as mine where the state is the main payer. If a major provider struggles it is likely to mean that it will close its homes in the north but not the south.

There is no capacity in local government to take over those homes. Any private sector supplier that did so would be taking an unsustainable risk, because they are currently loss-making businesses. At the moment there appears to be no plan B for the Government. I want to ask the Minister whether he accepts the scale of the impending crisis. Crisis point will be reached shortly in our region as demand continues to increase while spending is drastically cut back. The Government’s care legislation will further increase the burdens on councils in England. The only way in which providers can make any money is by cutting services and by squeezing workers’ pay and conditions.

The comprehensive spending review in December 2015 gave councils the option of adding a social care precept of up to 2% to annual council tax bills to raise extra money to pay for adult social care. However, as well as being regressive, as we have already discussed, the precept will at best raise £2 billion by 2020, against a predicted funding gap of closer to £8 billion. Indeed, the King’s Fund estimates that at best the precept will raise £800 million.

I want to use this opportunity to raise some contributory factors to the crisis, which the Government need to address, and I will begin by talking about the care workforce and national minimum wage compliance. The Resolution Foundation has estimated that care workers—both those in care homes and those providing home care—are already collectively cheated of £130 million a year because of sub national minimum wage pay. That is driven by chronic underfunding of the care sector, poor employment practices, poor commissioning practices and the ineffective enforcement of the national minimum wage by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

One employer, which will remain nameless at this stage, has put to its workforce a set of proposed changes to terms and conditions, to prepare for the introduction of the national living wage. Those include withdrawing all bank holiday and overtime enhancements, removing contractual sick pay, scrapping the meal allowance for workers when they are eating with clients, asking workers to pay for their own registration with the Disclosure and Barring Service, enforcing eight hours per annum of unpaid training time, introducing new duties and making changes to existing duties. In care homes non-payment of the national minimum wage is driven by a failure to pay for actual hours worked, such as when staff are not properly recompensed for overnight sleep-ins or time spent training; failure to pay for uniforms; and deduction of money for accommodation that does not form part of an employment contract.

The Financial Times has said that,

“businesses that run care homes for the elderly are at risk of going bankrupt, especially those reliant on revenues from local authority funded places, from a double blow of the imminent increases in the minimum wage and tighter immigration rules, making it harder to recruit from overseas”.

That is the issue I want to discuss next. The care sector is particularly dependent on migrant labour. The latest estimates suggest that nearly a fifth of the workforce are non-British. Unison has highlighted a particular problem in the care home sector with regard to the treatment of migrant workers. In a recent round-table event, a group of Filipino workers reported that they were paying £300 a month each to share a flat with only one toilet and no lounge at the residential care home where they worked. The rate paid for the work they did was £7.02 per hour, but there were then monthly deductions. The deductions were for their uniform—they got one per year but had to pay every month—and for training; that is a breach of national minimum wage law. The cost would normally be more than £200 a month, and it transpired that the workers were not necessarily getting the uplifts in the minimum wage that they were entitled to.

The round table also heard that a working week for the staff could sometimes be as long as 60 hours, depending on staffing levels, despite the fact that they were contracted for 36 hours. They could also find themselves working a 10-hour night shift for a paltry £35, way below the national minimum wage, and with no sleeping permitted. The employer extorted £500 each from that group of workers as their initial five-year period in the job came to an end, on the basis that payments were needed to retain a licence to hire foreign workers and to protect their immigration papers. The staff were also subject to body searches before meeting the employers. To compound matters, they were then obliged to pay fees of £2,000 each for a solicitor to renew their work permits—in cash. The work permits are for work with that one employer, so if the workers lost them they would lose their visa and have to leave the country. Not only is the exploitation of immigrant workers immoral, but it drives down terms and conditions across the sector for all workers and reduces the number of job opportunities for local people.

I want to discuss some wider problems in the care home sector. The social care workforce are predominantly female, with the latest estimates suggesting that 82% of care workers are women and that the percentage is broadly similar across all types of care. Social care is a highly gender-segregated sector, with low pay and poor conditions reflecting, as my hon. Friend the Member for York Central has mentioned, the historic undervaluing of what is deemed to be women’s work. Compared with other sectors, the workforce are also particularly concentrated in the 45 to 60 age bracket. Government-backed attempts to move away from that disproportionately middle-aged demographic have foundered, largely on the basis that the quality of work, pay and conditions is simply not attractive enough to bring in younger staff.

Residential care tends to be based on shift work and there are often problems with short-staffing, with care workers being called on at short notice to cover shifts. That can be particularly problematic for night shifts, where the compensation is often insufficient. There may also be pressure from care providers to work beyond a 48-hour working week. Vacancy rates and staff turnover are high across the sector. Councils are struggling to retain social workers in the face of high caseloads, a blame culture and competition over pay. High turnover has damaging implications for the continuity and quality of care.

There is no English language requirement for care workers whose first language is not English. The overall level of training and qualifications across the care sector is low. There are expectations of induction training for staff but the nature and quality varies considerably. There is less training available in outsourced services, and there are particular concerns about agency staff not receiving training. There are increasing expectations for care workers to carry out medical treatments that have previously been the preserve of nurses or other NHS professionals, but there is no concomitant expansion in training. There are no longer any universal standards for providers to meet benchmarks for percentages of trained staff in their workforces. Without obligations it makes no business sense for providers to do that training voluntarily, because of the high turnover of staff. There is also no central quality assurance mechanism for training, which leads to a lack of faith in qualifications, and no incentive—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I ask the hon. Lady to bring her remarks to a close in the next few seconds.

[Anna Turley]

I will. In summary, the Government’s crisis in funding for care homes has pushed the sector to the brink. Terms and conditions for the workforce are being squeezed, and the current funding structure for local authorities is simply unsustainable. The Government must get a grip.