Social Care Funding

Debate between Glyn Davies and Barbara Keeley

Thursday 10th November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) on securing this debate and on the way in which she opened it. I am sure that we all agree with her final comment about caring for those who served in and lived through the second world war. It is important that we not only debate social care here, but ensure that a much wider debate on the current and future funding of social care takes place across the country.

The Dilnot commission was tasked with making recommendations on how to achieve an affordable and sustainable funding system for care and support. No one here today will be able to go into too much detail about the report, but I should like to talk about some of the things that the report confirmed, including things that have been repeatedly said about social care for years. These are some of the key points. The current adult social care funding system in England is not fit for purpose and needs urgent and lasting reform. The current system is unfair and unsustainable. Without reform, it will deliver ever poorer outcomes for individuals and families. The funding of social care is inadequate—people are not receiving the care and support that they need. Indeed, there is an unacceptable level of variation in eligibility for services; we have 152 different adult social care systems. For a number of years, care has been rationed through the fair access to care system, but that system is now seen to lack transparency, consistency and clarity. Assessments for care are not portable. Given the variations in eligibility, the problem causes frustration and worse than that when people needing care have to move to a new local authority.

The provision of information and advice is poor quality and very limited. People struggle to find financial information and advice, and there is little information and advice for carers. While there are significant overlaps between funding streams for housing, benefits, the NHS and social care, the systems that administer them are not joined up, which means that we do not have integration, that we have poor co-ordination and that people have to suffer multiple assessments. Perhaps worst of all—Andrew Dilnot rightly drew attention to this—the system is so complex and difficult to understand that most people do not plan for or think about the future provision of care that they may need. I am sure that many right hon. and hon. Members will have had cases of constituents who thought that social care was free and were shocked when they discovered that it is not and that they will be faced with paying the costs of care.

All those points are a disturbing appraisal of the system of care and support on which millions of people depend because they are frail, elderly or have a disability or long-term condition. We have known about all those problems for some time and I have spoken out on these issues since I came into the House in 2005, with a variety of different people filling the role that the Minister now occupies.

In 2009 and after much consultation, my party brought forward plans to establish a national care service. Given the pressing needs of those people with the greatest care needs, we also passed the Personal Care at Home Act 2010 to provide free personal care at home for the 400,000 people with the greatest care needs. It was not a perfect solution, and I do not think that anyone thought that it was, but it would have provided financial peace of mind to 400,000 individuals and their families.

My party’s proposals were treated as political footballs during the general election campaign. There were some regrettable political attacks on the proposals for social care, which was unfortunate.

[Glyn Davies]

Does the hon. Lady not accept that the way in which those proposals were treated before the last general election was massively damaging? I was not a Member of Parliament then, but I was ashamed of some of the language that I heard coming out of the House. It is wrong to attribute the matter to any particular party. If we are going to deal with this issue properly, we have to set aside that sort of language because it serves no purpose and damages our reputation with the public.

[Barbara Keeley]

Indeed. As ever with interventions, that was almost the next thing that I was going to say. I was going to say that the whole incident was unfortunate. I am chair of the all-party group on social care and I want to see a consensus built in this Parliament to take forward a solution to the funding of care and support, so I very much agree with the hon. Gentleman.

We must set our minds to the fact that, this time, the debate must be different. We need to build consensus across the parties and across the country. The need for a solution is more pressing than ever. We know that requests for support are increasing. In 2009-10, there were 2.1 million contacts from new clients to social services, an increase of 4% from 2008-09 and of 8% from 2004-05. We also know that many hundreds of thousands of people never have their needs assessed.

At the Health Committee this week, I asked a question of the president of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services about levels of unmet need. He seemed unable to quantify it. How can we plan for provision of social care if we do not know the levels of unmet need? Research by Age UK showed that 82% of local authorities now provide care only to those with “substantial” or “critical” needs. I am glad to say—I think that the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth also has a council in her constituency that is perhaps doing a bit better—that my own local authority, Salford city council, is among the 18% of councils in the country that still provide care for those with “moderate” needs.

I welcome the commitment of my Labour council colleagues to try to meet the needs of the more vulnerable members in our communities. I understand how difficult the position is, but I value all those councils that are rightly taking the decision to protect social care. We know that vulnerable people in other areas are not so fortunate. Recent studies by the Office for National Statistics and the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Population Change have looked at the issue of unmet need for social care. The centre concludes that, regardless of the data source used

“there is significant unmet need for care among older people.”

It gives the example of a group of people aged over 65 who needed help with bathing. Of that group, 66% were not receiving any help with bathing. That example was based on 2008 data. Since 2008, we have had front-loaded cuts to local authority budgets, which will have caused greater levels of unmet need.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) referred to local authority budget cuts and now the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services has reported £1 billion of cuts to social care budgets in 2010-11, with a similar or greater level of cuts being predicted for next year. What impact those cuts will have is of concern to us in Parliament.

The NHS Confederation reminds us that when people’s needs for social care are not met, they turn to the NHS. The NHS Confederation says that that will mean increasing numbers of unscheduled and emergency admissions to hospital, as well as delayed discharges from hospital. Indeed, recent figures from the Department of Health show that the number of delayed discharges from hospital was 11% higher in September and October this year than in the same two months in 2010. Clearly, delaying discharges from hospital is an expensive solution to the problem of inadequate social care. Indeed, the NHS Confederation says that, without reform, the NHS will ultimately buckle under the pressure of demand from patients who need social care.

The problem of unmet need is getting worse and of course much of the extra burden will fall on unpaid family carers, many of whom are already overburdened. I will cite two examples of unpaid family carers that Carers UK has told me about.

One is Eric from Lancashire, who has cared for his wife, Diane, for 20 years. She has multiple health conditions and needs constant support. Eric had to give up work 15 years ago to care for her full-time. When his local council provided 10 hours of support each week, Eric could get out of the house, have some time for himself, do the shopping and even do some volunteering with local charities. Earlier this year, however, council cuts meant that Eric and Diane’s care package was cut in half, despite the fact that Diane’s health has not improved. Eric is worried about his own health, because he needs to use all of the time that he has free from caring for Diane, which is now only five hours each week, to run basic errands, and he no longer has any time for himself. We can all imagine how difficult that must be.

The second example is of an unpaid family carer who is in perhaps an even more difficult situation. Joyce, aged 58, cares for her husband Robert, who is 71 and has dementia. She gave up work as an accountant four years ago to care for Robert full-time. With their savings and Robert’s military pension, they are over the means test threshold for local authority support. Robert is doubly incontinent, and easily confused and distressed, so he cannot be left alone. Just to go to the supermarket, Joyce has to pay £12 an hour for a sitter. For longer breaks, she has to pay £18 an hour for specialist care. Paying for a day of replacement care or for a weekend away means that costs escalate, because Joyce has to pay for multiple care workers and even a nurse. It is important to note that the charges that Joyce is paying have risen by 20% during the past four years. Joyce gave up work to care for Robert and her only income now is from the carer’s allowance of £55 a week. She knows that residential care, when Robert needs it, will cost thousands of pounds a month, which makes her very fearful of the future.

I said earlier, and I think that it is the case, that there is clear agreement that our social care system is no longer fit for purpose and that reform of the funding system is overdue. However, the important point is that none of the people I have referred to in those examples would be helped with their current issues by the Dilnot report’s recommendations, because they offer little for overburdened family carers who are caring for people at home.

A report by the Strategic Society Centre suggests that the “capped cost” model recommended by Dilnot will pose a dilemma to policy makers and could create resentment among family carers. Carers such as Joyce save the state many thousands of pounds by providing informal care. However, when the person they care for enters residential care, they will still be liable for the first £35,000 of care costs. That does not seem fair.

The recommendations of the Dilnot commission are an important step on the path to reform, but we must look widely at what is needed. We must focus on the gap in funding, which exists under the current system as well as in the projections of future funding needs. We must also have the widest possible debate on the options that are available. It seems that there is a problem in getting a debate on these issues that is wide enough to build the consensus that Members from all parties have talked about in Westminster Hall today.

I know that the Minister who is here today is involved in an engagement exercise and that leaders from the care and support community are helping to lead those discussions. However, I want to ask whether and how we can debate this issue more widely. There are 6.4 million carers who have a stake in the issue. There are 1.6 million staff who work in the provision of social care, which is more than the number of staff in the NHS. We should perhaps not be surprised that those people find it harder to be in contact with MPs and Ministers to give their views. They do not have the time in their busy and pressed lives to go along to consultation events; it is very difficult for them to do so. It says much about the isolation of carers and of the staff who work with people who need care that they have few opportunities to get together and put forward their views and comments, so it is our job to find out about that, and to talk to and build a consensus with those people.

After the launch of the Dilnot report, the all-party group on social care asked how the public debate on future funding of social care would develop. We asked a Health Minister—it was Earl Howe, as the Minister who is here today was unable to attend that meeting—whether Andrew Dilnot and the other commissioners could continue to play a role, and whether the secretariat for the commission would continue.

In July this year, I, as the chair of the all-party group on social care, and the chairs of 11 other all-party groups associated with social care wrote to the Prime Minister, the Health Secretary and the Minister with responsibility for social care, who is here today. The MPs and peers in those all-party groups stressed the need for action. We asked the Government to accept the urgent need for reform, but we also asked them to provide resources to support meetings across the country to promote the debate on social care, facilitated by members of the Care and Support Alliance, which is the umbrella group of more than 50 charities that represent older people, disabled people and those with long-term health conditions, as well as their families.

As we have already heard today, the future of social care is of national importance and it should involve the millions of people who depend on social care and the staff who provide care services. Can the Minister tell us what resources the Government will allocate to promote the debate on social care, including providing support to the members of the Care and Support Alliance to run meetings and take the debate forward?

Finally, can the Minister update us on the level of commitment that he believes exists in the Government and more widely to take forward the issues that have been raised today, and to take action to deliver what we said in our letter to the Prime Minister and others we want to see, which is a fairer system of charging for care that is matched by a financial settlement for local authorities so that they can deliver that fairer system?