Social Care
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Anna Turley(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. I need to correct that. When I say “order”, it means you should stop. I am not trying to cause any problems. We must have short interventions. If not, I will have to put a time limit on speeches. Intervene, by all means, but interventions must be short.
Anna Turley
My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (Faisal Rashid) is spot on. It was telling that the right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) made the point that local councils have reached the point where they do not want to deliver social care any more. We know perfectly well what the reason is. If they had the funding, I am sure they would be delighted to deliver social care, but we know what impact the cuts have had.
Ministers have focused on squeezing more out of local taxpayers, which provides only a drop in the ocean compared with the extra funding that is needed to close the gap.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
I believe there is a voluntary time limit of seven minutes. We are in danger of spoiling that. If we do, I will have to bring in a time limit of about 5 minutes. I do not want to do that, so I need Members to help me ensure that everybody gets an equal amount of time.
Anna Turley
My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) is absolutely right and I welcome all the interventions, but I should probably now crack on with my speech. She is spot on in saying that there is a critical need for training in the workforce and that not enough has been invested in them.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mike Hill) mentioned Unison, which has done fantastic work in the sector. Its biennial survey with Community Care magazine last year revealed a worrying picture of care workers having a lack of time to spend with residents. Nearly half the respondents to the survey said that the volume of cases they were responsible for left them feeling “over the limit” and more than half blamed staff shortages for their heavy workload.
As well as providing direct care, practitioners often have a responsibility to support the army of family carers who themselves are working to look after relatives at home. The shadow care system, as it is known, is running alongside the care system, keeping the whole thing going through the love and good will of unpaid family support and kinship carers, as has been discussed. For example, the Junction Foundation in my constituency, which I am proud to support as my charity of the year, does a lot of work with young carers who bear the pressures of looking after relatives while their peers are enjoying growing up. In Redcar and Cleveland, we have a fantastic organisation called Carers Together, which provides support and tailored services to people in care roles. It is aware of around 7,000 carers in the borough, but the 2011 census suggests that the number could be much higher.
I want to say a bit more about the workforce. As my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South said, they are underpaid, undervalued and overworked. The National Audit Office report from February was damning in its assessment that the Department of Health and Social Care
“is not doing enough to support a sustainable social care workforce.”
Data from the Skills for Care charity suggests that there is currently a turnover rate of 32% for the role of care worker in adult residential care in England, but that rises to a shocking 44.3% for care workers in adult domiciliary care. It is completely understandable that people working in this tough environment decide to leave the care profession when the pressure becomes too great. If people are to see social care as a viable career, they need to feel valued, and too often that is not the case.
With demand for social care increasing as our population ages, the workload will only get larger for the staff who remain. As the National Audit Office report also suggests, the Government are simply not providing the leadership that is needed. Local councils and care partnerships that are commissioning care are not being given the confidence of a national strategy designed to support the workforce and recruit new carers. A national strategy, for example, could see health and social care brought more closely together. The silo mentality between the NHS and social care has meant that the two services have passed patients to and fro, duplicating resources and missing the opportunities to work together to deliver better outcomes.
It is welcome that the Government have endorsed more partnership working, and these relationships are already getting results. In Redcar and Cleveland, our current partnership, which is led by the health and wellbeing board, has been given a rating of excellent by the National Audit Office. Our better care fund shared budget with the local clinical commissioning group is already leading to some positive outcomes, with a reduction in the number of non-elective admissions to hospital. This joined-up working is also leading to the establishment of an intermediate care centre in Eston in my constituency, which will help elderly patients to avoid long hospital stays and receive recovery support closer to home. It is a great initiative, with the local council and the NHS working more closely together. These initiatives show the huge possibilities from integrating health and social care, but on their own, they barely scratch the surface in dealing with the crisis facing services.
Social care is in desperate need of an urgent cash boost to address the funding gap, to ensure that social care services are properly staffed, and to ensure that the workforce get the pay and development support that they deserve for the work they do. The social care levy and grants in the autumn 2017 Budget have staved off collapse, but the disastrous bankruptcy of Northamptonshire County Council shows what happens when the pressure from cuts becomes too great to manage.
In the longer term, the system needs reform and these decisions cannot be kicked into the long grass any more. It is time for a care system fit for the 21st century, which puts social care on an equal footing with the NHS, and does not leave elderly people and their families worrying about needing to sell their home to pay the care bill.
Tax Avoidance and Multinational Companies
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Anna Turley(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The clock is on zero. I think it would be unfair to allow the hon. Gentleman to give way.
Financial Conduct Authority
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Anna Turley(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)
I share the hon. Gentleman’s concern about honing in only on the bad news, but that is cold comfort to the many constituents of ours facing these difficult problems. My constituent Mr Lilley and his family own a small glass and DIY business in the village Marske. They were mis-sold an interest rate hedging product by HSBC and are still owed thousands of pounds because of the difference in the premium. Is that not a perfect example of how the FCA is failing to investigate? This issue is of huge personal significance to our constituents—
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Anna Turley
Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry), who always looks to defend his constituents well. The points he made about stamp duty are thought-provoking and I appreciate his sharing them with the House.
The need to address the housing crisis in this country has never been greater. Rising demand, a chronic lack of supply and a woeful lack of long-term vision from the Government have ramped up the pressure in every region of the country. I am glad that the Government have brought this Bill to the House for us to examine and that they are finally showing effort to stem the crisis. It is a relief that they have woken up to the urgent need to build more homes, after five years of neglect, when house building fell to some of its lowest peacetime levels on record.
This Bill, however, does nothing to tackle some of the most profound problems the housing sector faces. For so many of my constituents, home ownership must become more affordable and more readily accessible, so that those looking to own a home can take their first step on the ladder. The Government’s attempt at solving that is their “starter homes programme”, which is at the forefront of this Bill. Anybody taking even a cursory look at the detail will reach a glaring conclusion: the homes are simply not affordable to those on ordinary incomes. Shelter has published information to suggest that families on the Government’s new national minimum wage—it is a minimum wage, not a national living wage—will be able to afford a starter home in only 2% of local authority areas. That raises the question: which bracket of the population is the scheme supposed to be assisting? We need genuinely affordable homes, not assistance packages which people who are currently frozen out of housing ownership are not going to be able to get anywhere near.
Although this Bill will do little to make the dream of home ownership a reality for those who want it, my biggest anxiety is that it will deal a fatal blow to social housing. The Bill aggressively promotes starter homes by forcing planning authorities to prioritise them over all other types of housing, such as affordable rented homes and social housing. That approach directly imperils the section 106 obligations of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, measures which in the past decade have secured more than 230,000 affordable homes. Any endangerment of those provisions would be nothing short of a tragic loss of what should be referred to as genuinely affordable homes. Coast & Country, a housing association in my constituency, has just signed a deal with Bellway Homes to provide 13 new affordable rented homes on a site in Redcar. Under the measures in this Bill, those homes risk being side-lined. Maintaining a mix where truly affordable homes are part of developments must be a priority in any solution to the housing crisis.
On right to buy, the implementation of the so-called “voluntary” scheme is at best a poorly thought out policy and at worst a direct block to securing social housing. Housing associations have complained that the concept is flawed. We know from the performance of the earlier model that more than 30% of all homes sold in this way are now controlled by private landlords. Like many of my colleagues, I do not have an ideological problem with right to buy, but I fundamentally disagree with the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), who calls us “bourgeois lefties”. It is not bourgeois to object to the exploitation of a precious asset—a home—to push up rents and take the aspiration of home ownership further away by reducing supply. That provision will mean higher rents and higher spending on housing benefit, producing the worst outcome for tenants, housing associations and the Exchequer, as well as a catastrophic depletion of social housing stock, which will effectively be lost for ever.
Just as concerning is the costing. How is the voluntary right to buy scheme being funded? As the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, the scheme has serious up-front costs, because housing associations will have to be compensated for sales below market value. The National Housing Federation estimates that if all of the eligible households decide to take up the scheme, it could cost an astonishing £11.6 billion. Even a casual analysis reveals a serious imbalance between the money going out fully to compensate the housing associations and the money we have been told is going to fund it, which will come from councils selling their most expensive properties as they become available. That scheme is estimated to raise about £4.5 billion.
We are barely six months beyond the election, and already we on the Labour Benches have stopped expecting the Government’s maths to add up. Clearly, ideology trumps economics. Once again, that can be seen in the 1% cut to social rents, which will lead to a £16 million shortfall in the next four years for my housing association in Redcar, thus affecting its broader services, such as tackling antisocial behaviour, supporting financial inclusion, and helping people stay in their homes. All of those services will be cut, shunting more costs on to other aspects of public services. It will also result in considerable job losses to my local housing association, which is one of the best and most secure employers in my constituency, particularly in the current climate.
Finally, I wish to touch on the pay-to-stay mandatory rents for high-income social tenants. This proposal is the latest nonsensical assault on working families that proves just how out of touch this Government are with the reality that thousands of tenants face. If the collective income of a household is £30,000, rents will be increased to market level. For a couple on £15,000 each—not much more than the national minimum wage—the proposal could be a total disincentive to work additional hours or seek higher paying employment. I ask the Secretary of State to clarify that point and to avoid the Government yet again taking money out of the pockets of hard-working people.
The Secretary of State started his speech today with a noble description of new housing as more than “bricks and mortar”. He talked about how the homes we build shape the lives and prosperity of the people who live in them. But why should my constituents give him any credit for such a statement when his Government persist with the wretched bedroom tax? [Interruption.] It is all very well for Members on the Government Benches to titter, but thousands of my constituents have been forced out—