Covid-19: Social Care Services

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, for introducing this important debate. I will focus my comments on the impact on the UK’s 1.5 million people who live with learning disabilities. Their challenges have been exacerbated by this pandemic. They are already seven times more likely to be socially isolated and to suffer mental health problems, and so are at particular risk from the effects of quarantine. They are challenged to understand social distancing and they are at high risk of respiratory problems, making them more vulnerable to the virus.

While the action plan for adult social care acknowledges the Covid-related challenges of this community, disability advocates have raised a number of concerns about the plan and the sector’s specific challenges. Workforce support is a key pillar of the plan but is silent on pay increases, which is a significant factor in retention and recruitment. As the workforce includes 115,000 people from the EU, staff shortages are a long-term concern.

Concerns have also been expressed that the £1.6 billion emergency funding for local authorities to support social care providers is insufficient and that distribution across different areas is uneven. The noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, articulated concerns about guidance on the assessment of people with learning disabilities who contract Covid-19, with GPs wrongly conflating support needs with frailty and telling people that they will not be prioritised for treatment.

Finally, there are concerns about flexibilities to social protection introduced by the Coronavirus Act. Can the Minister provide reassurance that people with learning disabilities will not fall through the gaps and end up locked away in in-patient units? There are already 2,000 people in these units, often far from their families and held in inappropriate environments—sometimes confined to a single room—while awaiting the completion of their care and treatment reviews. I know personally one family in the midst of such a process, with a long-awaited solution tantalisingly in sight before coronavirus put everything on the back burner. Can the Government give this family and others like them reassurance that their needs will not go to the back of a long queue, or be forgotten altogether, once this immediate crisis is under control?

The desperate need for long-term reform of social care has been highlighted yet again by the situation we now face. In 1942, while the world was at war, the British Government produced the Beveridge report, and with it the basis for the welfare state. This crisis must inspire the same sort of visionary thinking. It is not just a question of how we react to this pandemic; it is about the legacy that this generation will leave behind.