Covid-19: Social Care Services

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, for securing this important debate. As the terrible and ever-rising death toll in care homes has so visibly shown, the social care sector, so long underfunded and neglected by politicians and policymakers, finds itself at the front line of this cruel pandemic. The severity of the challenge faced in care homes and other community settings is impossible to overstate. In short, care homes providing personal and close contact care need urgent access to reliable and ongoing supplies of protective equipment to protect residents and staff, rapid and accessible testing, and far greater support, with funding and equipment on an equal footing with the NHS.

If this pandemic has proved one thing, it is that health and social care are inextricably linked and cannot be treated differently. The National Care Forum has called on the Government to form a ring of steel around care homes, but what is it like at the moment? I have spent the past couple of days talking to various social care leaders running front-line social care services. It has been a humbling experience to hear what is going on.

Their stark messages include: how the rhetoric from government is hard to hear when the reality is so different; the confusing, contradictory and constantly changing nature of guidance issued by government and other bodies; the daily struggle to secure protective equipment, with government supplies sometimes being diverted to NHS facilities and homes having to source their own supplies at extortionate prices; staff shortages running at 25% alongside existing high vacancy levels that require the hiring of agency staff, which raises the risk of transmission; a serious shortage of nurses in homes and great difficulty recruiting, as nurses are deployed into the acute sector; testing arrangements which show little understanding of how the sector works, with care workers who have no car being asked to drive to centres many miles away, at times that do not fit with their shift patterns; patients being sent from hospitals into care homes without testing; much-needed financial resources from government not reaching the front line; GPs no longer coming into care homes to verify deaths, leaving such tasks to some of the lowest-paid staff; and care workers left feeling insecure and anxious when left in charge of clinical details.

Based on these conversations, I ask the Minister: why are care homes having to pay VAT on protective equipment when the NHS does not, and what urgent steps will the Government take to put them on an equal footing? What measures are they taking to ensure that some registered nurses in the newly returning workforce are deployed to care homes, which desperately need them? When will the newly established volunteer scheme be used to help care homes? Finally, when will the Government’s visa exemptions for NHS nurses be extended to those working in the social care sector?

When this terrible tragedy subsides, a long-overdue and fundamental reform of social care must be a top priority. A national health and social care system means just that: a fully integrated service, properly funded and run on an equal basis so that we are no longer, as one social care professional put it to me, simply an afterthought at the back of the queue.