Oral Answers to Questions

Catherine West Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

What steps he is taking to help enable face-to-face family visits to care homes.

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

What steps he is taking to help enable face-to-face family visits to care homes.

[The Minister for Care (Helen Whately)]

Throughout the pandemic, we have had to strike a balance between protecting people from this cruel virus and social contact. Nowhere has this been harder than in care homes. That is why I am so pleased that, from 8 March, we will be enabling care homes to open up carefully to more visiting. Our guidance will set out how residents can have a named person for repeat visits, with testing and PPE so that those visits can be indoors. We look forward to enabling more visiting as soon as it is safe to do so.

[Helen Whately]

The hon. Member makes an important point. We have been clear that we want to see care homes enabling visiting. We recognise that care homes are having to strike a balance between giving residents access to visitors and making sure that those residents are safe. Our guidance will provide further support to care homes on how they can make sure that those visits happen.

[Catherine West]

Care homes for older folk and disabled people are a basic human right. Given that care home residents—either in the care homes themselves or perhaps in hospital—account for a third of all deaths from covid, should the Government not be trying just a bit harder to provide the staffing that is often required for those extra visits? When will the Government lay out their plan to address social care, which is so clearly lacking and has been promised for about 10 years now?

[Helen Whately]

The hon. Member is right to say that visiting at the moment involves extra staffing—for instance, staff to supervise visits and to support the testing that we will be bringing in with the new visiting guidance. We have already provided funding to the social care sector that can be used to support the cost of visiting, and there is additional funding for extra workforce costs.