Disabled People: Personal Assistants

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Thornton]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to address the reported shortage of working age disabled people’s personal assistants, needed to enable them to work and live independently.

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

Personal assistants are invaluable in supporting people to live independently. The Government have in place a range of measures to support recruitment and retention, including delivering a national recruitment campaign, providing a £462.5 million boost for recruitment last winter and ongoing work with the Department for Work and Pensions to promote carers in adult social care. We are also investing £500 million to support and develop the social care workforce, including personal assistants, to address long-term barriers to recruitment and retention.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer. The lack of PAs is a serious emergency and is creating huge anxiety for the working-age disabled, who need and have a legal right to be economically and social active. What seems to have happened is that the market for and availability of people who want and value this kind of job have vanished. Welcome as they were, none of the measures that the Minister mentioned address that emergency. For example, one no-cost action that would help—it would not solve the problem, but it would help—would be for PAs to be recognised as skilled workers and be made eligible for work in the UK, since more than 32% of them vanished as a result of Brexit. Are the Minister and his colleagues meeting the disabled groups that are very concerned about this matter?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for raising those issues. As she will recognise, some of them fall between DWP and the Department of Health, so I can take the second question back to DWP on her behalf. We recognise this issue as part of the wider social care sector but one issue with bringing people in from overseas—as many noble Lords will know, I am in favour of recruiting from overseas—is that personal assistants are often employed by individuals and, sadly, under the Home Office rules, they are not considered sponsors. When this was raised with me yesterday, I asked for it to be looked into in more detail and was assured that more conversations will be going on. It is a reasonable suggestion; we just need to have those conversations with the relevant department.