Social Care Reform

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab) [V]]

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair today, Dr Huq. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) on securing this important debate and I pay tribute to her for her commitment to and advocacy for social care over many years.

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate today as a co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on adult social care. Throughout most of the covid-19 pandemic, I have met on a weekly basis members of the APPG’s working group, which includes not-for-profit care home providers, home care providers and people with lived experience of receiving adult social care.

These meetings provided a valuable insight in real time into the impact that the pandemic has had on the social care workforce. I have to say that, very often, the first-hand experiences reported to me bore no relationship to the Government’s statements on social care. There was no protective ring around care homes; residents and staff contracted coronavirus and died, because they could not access personal protective equipment or testing. Domiciliary care was completely neglected. There were no protocols on managing infection risk for staff who provide care to multiple people in their own homes. People who manage their own care at home could not get access to advice or PPE. There was not the financial support to enable care workers to self-isolate when necessary, without their having to worry about how they would put food on the table.

Throughout the pandemic, the social care workforce carried on looking after our most frail and vulnerable loved ones, consoling people who did not understand why family members were unable to visit, holding hands, and comforting people as they passed away.

In responding to my written parliamentary question on whether the Government would recognise the contribution of the social care workforce during the pandemic with a payment, as the Welsh Labour Government have done, the Minister said that the Government had issued the care badge. A badge does not put food on the table, help to pay the rent, compensate for lost income due to illness or self-isolation, or help with the stress and trauma that many care workers have endured.

The pressures on the social care sector were well documented before the covid-19 pandemic, and the pandemic has only made them worse. These pressures are evident across the diversity of the sector: just 4% of local authority social care directors are confident that they have the budget to meet their statutory duties; an increasing number of contracts are being handed back to councils; there are autistic people and people with learning disabilities who are still incarcerated in hospitals because there is no funding for community provision; 1 million people are eligible for care but do not receive any at all; and there are many more people whose care package does not meet the full range of their needs.

Social care has been urgently in need of reform for a decade. There is not a route to social care reform that does not address pay for social care staff. It is a shocking and unacceptable reality that in many parts of the country it is possible to earn more in the local supermarket than it is in caring for the most vulnerable members of the community. That situation must change.

There has been no lack of detailed cross-party work on the options for social care reform. Select Committees, APPGs and independent commissions have all explored the options and brought forward proposals. The lack of delivery is the consequence of a lack of political will. That has to change. We owe it to the workforce, who have been through so much this past year, not to delay any longer.