Covid-19: Care Homes

Baroness Newlove Excerpts

Wednesday 20th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Baroness is quite right to focus on the importance of social care, but I think she unfairly characterises the effort made to ensure that social care is protected. The social care action plan announced on 15 April has been enormously important and extremely effective. Also on 15 April, we rolled out outbreak testing for all symptomatic care home staff and residents. We brought in extra funding on 16 April, with £850 million in existing social care grants. There has been new guidance and more money for local authorities, and we have launched a workforce recruitment campaign for care home staff. An enormous amount has been done. Care homes were always vulnerable, and we have sought to put every possible measure in place to protect them.

[Baroness Newlove (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the Statement. Unfortunately, I am having hearing issues, which are overriding the voices.

Can the Minister tell us what the business model is for care homes? We are seeing so many deaths in our care homes because of Covid-19 that it highlights that there may be underlying issues. We must think of the staff who are caring for the most vulnerable in our society.

[Lord Bethell]

My noble friend raises one of the key features of our social care system. It is provided by 12,000 different care home providers—or 16,000, depending on how you measure it—many of whom have very different business models. This creates a rich and diverse tapestry of provision, but it is also extremely difficult to engage with from a central campaign provision. That is one of the challenges that we have faced when rolling out support such as PPE and testing. We do not believe that the business models are inappropriate, but undoubtedly we have challenges when we are trying to reach all the care homes with an equal and central format.