Social Care Workers

Baroness Wheeler Excerpts

Wednesday 7th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

This is a very important piece of communication. We have sought to work through the colleges and through the CQC system in order to make sure that employers make knowledge of these funds available to those in social care. I will look at the department to see what we are monitoring and what the take-up rates have been, and if I have any further information I will be glad to write to the noble Baroness with that data.

[Baroness Wheeler (Lab)]

My Lords, on agency staff, according to workforce statistics from the Department for Education in February, the number of agency social workers grew by 10% last year. Cheshire East Council, for example, spent more than £1.3 million on agency social workers last year, and these costs also include the fees that the authority has to pay to the agencies. What funding and other support has been provided to local councils specifically to enable them to reduce the reliance on agency staff and to ensure that the money spent on temporary staff in social care departments, care homes and domiciliary care can instead be used to increase the number of permanent, full-time and part-time staff in social care that are so desperately needed?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the use of agency staff in itself is not something that we are fighting against. Agency staff, although often denigrated, provide an incredibly valuable contribution to the social care efforts of the country. That said, the main way in which we can address the dependence on sometimes expensive employment practices is to ensure that there is a really large pool of people taking the kinds of jobs offered in social care. That is why we are marketing those roles heavily, improving the employer brand around social care and improving the financial arrangements for those seeking training in social care.