Social Care

John Grogan Excerpts

Wednesday 25th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Grogan (Keighley) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the detailed analysis of my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (Faisal Rashid). As a Yorkshire MP, it is always good to follow a Member from the other side of the Pennines—it is early season yet, Mr Deputy Speaker, but particularly when Yorkshire is at the top of the county championship and Lancashire is at the bottom.

I want to take up two points directly from the seven principles that the Secretary of State outlined when he talked about the Green Paper in March. One of them is about a valued workforce, which many hon. Members have spoken about, and the other is about a sustainable funding mechanism for the future.

Every morning in the villages and towns of Airedale and Wharfedale—some of which I am lucky to represent—very early, before the commuters have got up and even thought of going into the great cities of Bradford and Leeds, another workforce have just finished their night shift and are getting the first buses and trains into those cities, where they live. They have the characteristics of the social care workforce, who number about 1.4 million in our country. They are a massive workforce. About 80% are women and 80%—the overwhelming majority—are British, with 11% coming from outside the European economic area and about 5% from within it. There is a massive turnover in the social care workforce, as Unison has illustrated, with more than one in three care workers in care homes leaving their job in the course of the year. It is higher in domiciliary care.

Members on both sides of the House have talked about valuing these workers more. They are undervalued, underpaid and in many cases undertrained. The right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) and particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) talked about building a consensus, so that in the future we value more this extremely important workforce, who look after the most vulnerable people in our society at the time they need it most.

I have a couple of suggestions for the Government. It was good to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) that a Labour Government would abolish 15-minute care—the idea that social care workers have to provide for the most intimate needs in 15 minutes, tick a few boxes and then rush off to the next appointment. It makes me proud to be a Labour MP that we are committed to ending that sort of thing and to paying people properly.

There are things the Government could do, and some are little things. I notice that there is an advisory council on the Green Paper. The great and the good are on that advisory council, but it would be good to have a figure from the workforce on it. I remember the Prime Minister speaking on the steps of Downing Street about involving the workforce more. Unison is a union you can do business with, and it would be good to have an additional person from the unions on that council. The Library’s list does not indicate that there is any such person on it at the moment.

If there ever was an industry crying out for a sectoral council, with the Government, the trade unions and the industry, to improve skills and the quality of the workforce, it surely is the care industry. Those are just a couple of ideas.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West spoke passionately about the need to get consensus on a long-term funding model that all parties can agree on. I would stop talking about a “dementia tax”, and the bargain would be that the Conservatives would not talk about a “death tax”. We have used both those terms in the last 10 years, and I agree that they have not particularly enhanced our politics.

The letter from Members of all parties suggested raising and hypothecating national insurance. I would like to keep on the table the idea of an increase in inheritance tax, which the now Mayor of Manchester mentioned in the latter days of the Labour Government. Only 4% of people currently pay inheritance tax. It raises £5 billion. It is a potential way of achieving intergenerational fairness. A national insurance rise at the moment would hit many workers whose real incomes have been cut in recent years, so we should consider the option of raising inheritance tax. I think that many people in our society who are lucky enough to own their own home would accept that bargain—a guarantee that they could pass on the bulk of their estate to members of their family or to any good causes they wanted to support, in return for which I think they would be prepared to pay an additional inheritance tax.

The hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) reminded us that one in four of us will end our days in a care home, but of course we do not know which of us that will be. We have to face up to the fact that, under the current system, those of us who are lucky enough to own our own home would lose most of it, if we were in a care home for a prolonged period. I see that as a life tax, rather than a death tax.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

rose—

[John Grogan]

I of course give way to my Yorkshire colleague.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Gentleman talks about one in four of us ending up in a care home, but we do not know which of us that will be. Does that lead him to conclude that we should pool the risk through social insurance, as they have done very successfully in Germany, having moved in 1995 from a local authority-funded scheme to a social insurance scheme, which also has great community benefits?

[John Grogan]

I certainly agree that we have to pool risk, but it has to involve everyone in society, from the poor to the rich, so that whatever our circumstances we get the care we need in those days.

We heard a lot from the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Scott Mann) and other hon. Members about the potential of technology. That is a worthwhile point to make. Age UK has provided all hon. Members with the number of elderly people in our constituencies who need care. For example, in Keighley there are 3,500 long-term disabled people and 16,000 people with long-term illnesses. One way of helping them is through telemedicine from Airedale General Hospital. Even when the “beast from the east” was raging at its worst, people in Keighley, Airedale and the dales, even in remote areas, could still have tests and get treatment via broadband. That kept them out of hospital, even in the depths of winter.

This has been a great debate and I look forward to the Green Paper—may it come sooner, rather than later.