Disabled People: Social Care

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I am very aware of this issue. Indeed, we have had the opportunity to speak about it in specific cases. Local authorities of course are obliged to provide respite care. The noble Baroness highlights an important point about care, which seems in a way to slip between the boundaries of the two. I shall write to her about the general policy work that is going on, but I know that we need to solve this because we have children who are now living longer who before might not have lived so long and who require care, as do their families. It is essential that they get the care that they deserve.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I know that the Minister will tell me and the House again about the extra billions that the Government are putting into social care. However, when everyone else says that there is clearly a social care crisis, we have some dissonance here. The evidence of this crisis is the regression of opportunity and care for young disabled people, which is there to see in personal cases where people are not receiving the sort of support that they need. I am not convinced about the Green Paper looking at social care for older people. The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, is right—that makes me more concerned, and I join her in that concern. Will the Minister explain how the Government will achieve their target of 1 million more disabled people being in work by 2027 if they cannot get out of bed and travel to work without help because of this combination of cuts and the stalling of a coherent support policy to make that possible?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I do not want to disappoint the noble Baroness, but she is aware that more money is going in. To address the specific issue that she talks about—and I obviously can talk about it only from the point of view of the Department of Health—we want and are seeing more disabled people going into work. I would point to one big investment that the Department of Health is making, which is the disabled facilities grant. That is about making sure that disabled people can live at home and have their independence, which of course is critical to maintaining their physical health and confidence to make them, in a way, ready to go into work. I know that there are other programmes being put through job centres and the Department for Work and Pensions to make sure that they are supported, too.