Skills for Care Report

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Pitkeathley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they plan to take in response to the report by Skills for Care The state of the adult social care sector and workforce in England 2022, published on 11 October, which shows that there are 165,000 vacancies in the social care workforce and that this workforce has shrunk for the first time in 10 years.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Markham) (Con)]

My Lords, we are investing in adult social care. We have made £500 million available to support discharge from hospital into the community and bolster the workforce this winter; that is on top of record funding to support our 10-year plan as set out in the People at the Heart of Care White Paper. We are backing recruitment at home and abroad with a £15 million international recruitment fund and a new domestic campaign, which we will launch shortly.

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

I thank the Minister. I expected him to mention the £500 million workforce fund, of course, but he will know that it has been described as a drop in the ocean and that councils are calling for far more to be pumped into better pay and recruitment in the social care workforce. I do not want to be disrespectful to the new Minister, who I know has a lot on his plate, but I wonder whether he and the Government really understand the scale of the crisis in social care. Some 50,000 people left an already inadequate workforce last year; that is not surprising when they can get better pay and conditions in Tesco, and when one in five care workers is in poverty despite being in full-time work.

The previous Prime Minister told us that he would fix social care. The current Prime Minister has withdrawn the levy that would eventually have provided extra funds, with no indication of how those funds will be replaced. Is the Minister aware that, meanwhile, thousands of older and disabled people, both in their own homes and in care homes, are being neglected and deprived of services in a way that no decent society should tolerate? Will he acknowledge both the depth of the crisis and the fact that we need a step change in the way we value social care and the dedicated people who provide it?