Queen’s Speech

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, the Dilnot commission report on the funding of social care states:

“We should be celebrating the fact we are living longer and that younger people with disabilities are leading more independent lives than ever before. But instead we talk about the ‘burden of ageing’ and individuals are living in fear, worrying about meeting their care costs”.

I hope that the draft Bill will allow the Government to take an imaginative and forward-looking approach to the way in which we support those providing care so that we do it in a way that is fit for the modern world in which people now live.

Carers UK, in its report Growing the Care Market, sets out the costs of failures in social care and the economic opportunities of stimulating the care market. It has been estimated that 1 million people have given up work or have reduced working hours in order to care—in other words, about one in six of all carers. Figures published recently from the London School of Economics show that the public spending cost of carers giving up work to care for ill or disabled people is £1.3 billion each year in lost tax revenues and additional welfare payments. That is an enormous cost for not having got the system right.

A Carers UK survey of more than 4,000 carers found that 31% of working-age carers gave up work in order to care or reduced their working hours because local care services were unsuitable—they were too expensive, inflexible, unreliable or of poor quality. The peak age for carers is between 45 and 65, a time when people tend to be at the peak of their careers, their knowledge and their experience. Carers often have multiple responsibilities. If they give up their work to care, their experience is often lost in the long term from the workforce because when they try to return they may have difficulty in regaining a job.

The lack of adequate social care has a knock-on effect on healthcare. Very often, healthcare delivery is suffering because social care cannot be put in place. Patients do not come out of hospital as rapidly as they could because care packages are not in place or have broken down, or the additional supplement in care that they need cannot be provided within the resources of social care delivery. The scheme Employers for Carers, set up through Carers UK, recognises that a good system of care and support should be part of being a good employer. There are some interesting and innovative examples of supporting and providing leave arrangements for the workforce. Centrica British Gas found that special leave arrangements for carers delivers a bottom-line return of about £1 million a year.

There is also interesting experience from abroad. The Work and Care Act in the Netherlands provides a right to various forms of leave for working carers, with paid emergency leave of typically one day, short-term carer’s leave, which is reimbursed at approximately 70% of pay for a maximum of 10 days, and provision for long-term care leave. Poland has provision for short-term leave of up to two weeks a year with financial compensation at 80% of the average monthly wage over the previous 12 months.

In France, family care leave was introduced in 2006. There is an entitlement to unpaid leave if the carer is looking after a disabled relative or dependant. There is another leave option called family solidarity leave, which is available to employees to care for a relative with a life-threatening or terminal illness. There is also the opportunity for leave entitlements based on the working hours reduction, whereby leave can be accumulated over time up to 24 days, which can then be taken later on if people need it to provide care for a family member. In Canada, too, legislation allows carers leave from employment when they are caring for a relative who is terminally ill—this is called compassionate care benefits.

These measures are all operating in different healthcare systems and areas, but it is interesting to see that in different parts of the world the problem of carers and the need for families to be able to provide care has been looked at—and the solutions may in some ways be adaptable to the UK experience. Whatever we do and whatever emerges, it must be portable, so that if a person moves nearer their family their care is not jeopardised, and it must involve the person and their family in the assessment of care and provide information on how the family can access support and help.

Much care is provided through the voluntary sector. I welcome the Government’s statement that they will bring forward legislation that will decrease the burden on charities, enabling them to claim additional payments on small donations, because charities at the moment are finding it difficult to continue to meet their care obligations. That will be an important and positive part. But we also have a large number of unpaid volunteers who provide important care.

On a completely separate note and topic, I commend the Government for facing up to the problem of alcohol abuse and its related economic and social damage to the fabric of society. The proposals on minimum pricing are welcome, but a price that is a permanently fixed tariff will be diminished in effectiveness by inflation over time. I therefore urge the Government to consider a minimum price linked to another independent mark of cost of living expenses, which can then keep pace with alcohol prices over time and is consistent across the four nations of the UK.

At today’s cost of living indices, a 40p minimum unit price is projected to result in 1,180 fewer deaths and 38,000 fewer hospital admissions annually, whereas if it were set at the proposed Scottish level of 50p the projections of benefit rise and are more than doubled to almost 3,000 fewer deaths each year and 92,000 fewer hospital admissions.