Adult Social Care: Funding Debate
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Baroness Wheeler
Main Page: Baroness Wheeler (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Wheeler's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(7 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord O'Shaughnessy
The issue of children’s palliative care came up in the debate the other evening on palliative care. A review is taking place with the charitable sector of the distribution of funding, particularly for children’s hospices, over the next year. In terms of children’s social care—this may come as a surprise to some noble Lords; it certainly did to me—the fastest-growing part of the adult social care budget is for adults with learning disabilities. Of course, that often comes in at the point at which people leave the children’s social care system and the school system and move into the adult social care sector, so there is an important point about continuity from one to the other.
Baroness Wheeler (Lab)
My Lords, does the noble Lord accept that the domiciliary care of people in their homes is in deep crisis, with 400 care home businesses declared insolvent since 2010? Large providers such as Mitie have recently been selling their home care health business—it sold it off for just £2, plus a £10 million pay-off to the new outsourcing firm for business trading losses and other costs. What impact do the Government assess that the £2 billion Budget cash spread over three years will have on halting home closures and reducing the risk of industry collapse? Will the future Green Paper look at finding a new, more sustainable model for providing and funding residential and domiciliary care?
Lord O'Shaughnessy
The noble Baroness brings up the issue of care homes closing. Inevitably, there is churn in the system. There has been a stable number of residential care home and nursing home beds, which is one metric. The other is the fact that there are many more home care agencies, with a lot more domiciliary care going on, and over 150,000 more social care jobs, so I do not think that the picture is quite as the noble Baroness described it. However, making sure that we have a sustainable system is at the heart of the Green Paper plans.