Health and Social Care

Baroness Keeley Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend anticipates me, because this is precisely the issue I am coming on to. Under the Lansley reorganisation, workforce planning went out of the window, and that led to today’s huge workforce crisis and hospitals being in the grip of private staffing agencies. That is the single biggest driver of the NHS deficit that I mentioned a moment ago, and I will talk about that shortly.

The Secretary of State gave us a pious warning about temperate language, yet this is the Secretary of State who today on the front page of The Daily Telegraph is saying that the NHS has enough cash and now must deliver:

“the time for debating whether or not”

it has enough money is over, it

“now needs to deliver its side of the bargain”.

Not for the first time, that is a statement by the Secretary of State that will have caused jaws to drop across the NHS. People will not forget the time he accused hospitals of coasting when they were in the middle of an A&E crisis, but even by his standards this was a staggering piece of spin.

The simple fact is that the NHS does not have enough money. In fact it is seriously short of money. It is facing a £1 billion deficit this year, with two thirds of hospitals in the red, which marks a major deterioration from what the Conservatives inherited in 2010, when there was a surplus of over £500 million.

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

Are not some rather stupid decisions about to be made? Wythenshawe hospital has a £3 million deficit and is talking about cutting 28 district nursing posts. The Secretary of State said earlier that community resources are important. Of course they are, but if we are going to cut district nurses every time there is a trust deficit like the one at Wythenshawe, we are not going to get through another winter without a much more serious A&E crisis.

[Andy Burnham]

That is exactly the point. When we are in a crisis like this, short-term, knee-jerk cuts are made, which make the situation wrong in the long term.

When I raised these deficits in the election campaign, the Secretary of State said I was scaremongering, but just two weeks after the election the truth emerged. [Interruption.] He says I was, but we now know the truth. There was an £822 million deficit in the NHS last year, a sevenfold increase on the previous year. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says he is dealing with it. That is not good enough. That is appalling mismanagement of the NHS. Financial grip in the NHS has been surrendered on this Secretary of State’s watch, and things are looking even worse this year. Far from scaremongering, these issues are real and should have been debated at the last election. The NHS is now facing a £2 billion deficit this year. As my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) said earlier, that will mean cuts to beds, to staff and to services.

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is a pleasure to follow the speeches of so many new Members, in particular the excellent speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), as well as another fine speech by the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mims Davies), which we have just heard. Both those speeches were excellent expositions of the highlights of the Members’ local areas, and I was pleased to hear the commitment to carers that the hon. Member for Eastleigh has just made; I will expand on the issue of carers later.

I am delighted to have been elected by the people of Worsley and Eccles South to represent them in what is my third parliamentary term. There are 73,000 people in my constituency and I vow today to represent them all to the best of ability. Today, however, I want to talk about the 10,800 or so of my constituents who are unpaid family carers and part of the 6.5 million people who are carers across the UK. That is appropriate, because this year is the 50th year of the movement to support carers, and, as the hon. Member for Eastleigh has just said, next week is carers week. Carers week is a time when we celebrate the unpaid work of family carers, like the hon. Lady herself, and also a time when we should think about how we can better support those carers. Before I talk in more general terms, I pay tribute to Salford Carers Centre, which is part of the Carers Trust, and Salford Young Adult Carers project. I feel fortunate, as an MP in Salford, to know that the carers centre and the young carers project are providing such excellent support.

In April, when we were all busy campaigning, Carers UK published a survey of the state of caring. Over this Parliament, an estimated 10.6 million people will take on a new caring role for a family member or friend who is disabled, elderly or seriously ill, and the report tells us that we will not give them the support they need and deserve unless we make changes to ensure adequate care services and improved quality of care and, where we can, maintain and improve the financial support for carers.

It should be no surprise, after the last Parliament, that more than half of carers surveyed said they were worried about the impact of cuts to care and support services over the next year. They are right to be worried, because since 2010 Government cuts to local authority budgets have meant that more than £3.5 billion has been cut from adult social care budgets. Besides the quantity of support services available, which is important, family carers also worry about poor quality services. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) rightly referred earlier to those terrible 15-minute care visits. Only just over a quarter of carers reported positive experiences of home care or respite care, and just over a fifth reported bad or terrible experiences of care, with the rest reporting mixed or fair experiences.

I say to the Minister, whom I am glad is in his place, that we should not be happy to hear that there is a lot of poor quality care out there. Poor care services mean that family carers have to take even more on themselves, with little respite from caring. Again, it is no surprise that six out of 10 carers told Carers UK that they were at breaking point. Caring can have a substantial impact on the health of the family carer. More than eight out of 10 carers reported to Carers UK that caring was having a negative impact on their health, and that figure is much higher for people caring for someone with dementia. Some 74% of carers report that they are struggling to get a good night’s sleep, and 47% are having difficulty maintaining a balanced diet.

Sixty thousand carers are affected by the bedroom tax. In the last Parliament, I introduced a Bill to exempt households with one extra bedroom from the bedroom tax if a carer in the house was eligible for carer’s allowance. While a disabled person who needs overnight care from a paid careworker or non-resident relative is exempt from the bedroom tax, they are hit by the tax when the care is provided unpaid by a partner or another carer living in the same house. That is unfair. Subjecting carers to the bedroom tax is illogical as well as unfair. One aim of the bedroom tax was to improve work incentives for working-age claimants, with the assumption that people should seek work or increase the number of hours they work to pay the bedroom tax. But for many unpaid carers that is not an option—entitlement to carer’s allowance means caring for someone for more than 35 hours a week, and Carers UK reports that 60% of those caring for people with dementia care for 60 hours a week. Clearly they cannot move back into employment without reducing their ability to care.

It is an insult to the 2.3 million people who have made the difficult decision to give up work so that they can care for a family member to be penalised further for that decision. Last week, I asked the Prime Minister to confirm that the planned £12 billion of welfare cuts would not include a measure to cut eligibility for carer’s allowance. He did not answer the question, and neither did the Health Secretary today. It is even more worrying for the 670,000 carers who get carer’s allowance that it is going to be cut.

I have not read all the Conservative manifesto, but I know that it said little about carers. It said only this:

“We will increase support for fulltime unpaid carers.”

I have suggested that this will mean ensuring sufficient funding for social care as well as for the NHS and improving the quality of the care services. It will also mean that carers should not suffer financial hardship as a result of their caring. Full-time family carers should not be subject to the bedroom tax, and carers should not be worrying, as they now are, about losing their eligibility for carer’s allowance. My party was committed to making it a duty on the NHS to identify carers—a measure that would help carers’ health—and I hope we can see that brought forward, if not by the Government, then in a private Member’s Bill.

I have raised today a number of issues of great importance to 6.5 million carers. It is time that their issues achieved more prominence in the House, and I will continue to raise them, as I have done today.