Social Care

Baroness Verma Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, for initiating this debate, and I congratulate my noble friend on her maiden speech.

I declare an interest as a social care provider. I started the business 16 and a half years ago and have seen many changes in the sector, none of them for the better. It is right and proper that we value care workers, but we cannot do that if we do not have the funding, the time or the ability to recognise their work, which is so important that it would put much more pressure on the NHS if it was not done.

During the years that I spent on the Front Bench, I was unable to speak. Now that I am able to do so, I say to my noble friend the Minister that the NHS is a precious commodity which we all value but, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said, it needs to be combined with social care. We need to place social care and the health service on an equal footing. It is not just the elderly who have need of social care; many disabled people and young people are dependent on care workers to support them to live independently.

It has been said that we are the fifth largest economy in the world. If we are to muster a service that is reflective of our society, we must recognise that we need to pay the right price for the right care. I agree completely that we need the living wage, and I would pay care workers even more, but we have to recognise that, while we put the NHS on a very high pedestal, we do not do the same with social care. We need to reduce that gap and equalise the two.

In recent years, the social care businesses delivering domiciliary care have seen added administration costs—there are extra things that care staff and office managers have to deliver—yet there has been no indication of how that is going to be paid for by local authorities. Local authorities claim, rightly, that they do not have the funding. If there is to be funding for social care, it needs to be ring-fenced so that it cannot be diverted to other areas where local authorities face pressures.

In recent years we have had to implement electronic monitoring. To the noble Lord who thinks we are not monitored properly, I say that the social care sector is very well regulated and monitored. Of course, there will be the occasional bad apple, as there will be across all sectors, but I can tell the House that, having worked with and listened to my care staff and managers, I understand the frustrations of having to deliver good-quality care to people. Those care workers, who often will be the only contact that people have throughout a whole day, have to rush through delivering a package of care because the time they can spend on each visit has been so greatly reduced. This is an unacceptable way of treating the most vulnerable people in our community.

I urge the Minister to bear in mind that the social care sector looks after a lot of people, and not just the elderly, although the elderly make up a large proportion of those who end up using the NHS because often they do not get sufficient assistance in their homes. I urge the Minister not to look at integration for the sake of integration but to understand that there is a balance to be struck. Good-quality home care and rest home care prevents people ending up in the very expensive National Health Service.