International Women’s Day

Baroness Janke Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Janke (LD) [V]]

My Lords, this debate gives us an opportunity to reflect on women’s roles in the pandemic as well as on how any recovery must address the injustices and harms that it has revealed. Women make up 82% of care workers, who have played a vital role in caring for the vulnerable, disabled and sick. When I was a council leader I visited care homes in my city, and when I spoke to the staff one of the things they told me was: “Even though we do much of the same work as nurses, they are the angels but we are seen as the skivvies. People only change their minds once they see what we actually do.”

We have seen that lack of value reflected in government attitudes and the lack of wider support for this sector. Has there been weekly clapping for care workers, special arrangements in supermarkets for the social care workforce or outrage that care workers are not receiving a substantial pay increase, like for the nurses? Let us not forget the scandal of hospital discharges to care homes, where patients had not even been tested for the virus before being installed among vulnerable people and their carers, with the catastrophic results that we all know about.

Yet so many people depend on care workers just to be able to live their lives, whether independently or in care homes. Social care is a 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year activity but in return for that level of commitment its workforce receives pretty poor recompense. The latest data shows that in April 2020 the average care worker was paid just £8.50 an hour, the same as most supermarkets pay. Last year there were 112,000 vacancies at any one time, while turnover rates showed 430,000 staff—30.4%—leaving their jobs in any one year. The care sector has been starved of cash through systematic and deep cuts to the local government funding on which it depends. A senior care worker is now paid just 12p more per hour than a new starter.

Proposals for better care worker pay must include practical ways of requiring better pay when commissioning services. Linking training and qualifications to pay and creating proper career pathways across health and care are also well overdue to help much-needed recruitment. Recovering from the pandemic must include a new settlement for a properly resourced and valued care service. It must recognise and value the huge sacrifices made by the social care workforce during the pandemic, caring for elderly and vulnerable people with great professionalism and often at great personal risk, often in a context of desperately stretched services, sometimes in facilities that were not suitable for isolation, sometimes without adequate PPE and, until September, often without proper access to regular testing. There is an urgent need for appropriate pay, professional career structures and parity of esteem with NHS colleagues.

The Government must step up to their responsibilities and create a service that does not depend on the sacrifice of poorly paid and undervalued workers but instead is properly resourced and fit for purpose for ever-growing future needs.