Covid-19: Social Care Services

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Wheeler on initiating this debate and on her very powerful speech. I should declare an interest, in that a member of my family has been in care homes over the years and now has support in his own home, so I have some experience of how these things work.

The first problem, I think, is the poor statistics on this whole sector. We are beginning to get more information together, but it seems to me that, unless we have clear statistics so that we know what the provision is, we cannot easily change policy for the better. We know that many of the problems of social care are long-standing and existed for years before the present pandemic crisis hit us, but they meant that this sector was ill prepared for the difficulties that we now face.

One example that has been often cited is the long journeys that care home workers need to take to get tested. I was told that one person had to travel from Bournemouth to either Gatwick or Chessington— 100 miles each way—to be tested. That is an impossible journey for people who are hard-pressed to get to their places of work.

We all know that social care has for too long been the underdog. Acute services have tended to get the money, albeit not enough—I would not take away a penny from acute services; I would rather put more in—but social care has still tended to be the underdog, as characterised by the very low levels of pay earned by people in the sector.

We know that there are wonderful people working in social care, we know how hard they work and we know about the wonderful long-term relationships that they establish with the people they care for—making the death of such a person even more painful. Of course we must ensure that they have security in this country, and the issue of visas must be dealt with.

Of course we need more testing, as has been said, and of course that should have happened a long time ago. I understand that residents with symptoms and those being transferred to care homes will now be tested. I wonder when that will be completed and when all workers in care homes and domiciliary care will have had the chance to be tested.

I should mention in passing that not all people in care are elderly; there are young people who need help as well, and their problems are slightly different from the needs of the elderly but are still important.

I turn to domiciliary services, which tend to be forgotten. Visits by care workers to homes where a single isolated person is on their own are crucial—not just for their health and needs but to lessen the sense of isolation. Domiciliary workers who call on people’s homes often provide their only link with the outside world. If that were to stop because of the present crisis, that would be a disaster. Of course, as a society and a country we depend very much on family members to provide care. If one falls ill, there is an even more difficult situation for the care workers who have to come in; that appears to be the difficulty at the moment. I know of one care worker who has a long journey by Tube every day to his place of work. Until recently he was given two masks per day, which was hardly enough given that he visited many people per day and per week.

In the long term, surely the social care sector needs a sustainable funding settlement so that it can look forward sensibly to the future. We have to reform the social care system, ensuring that the long-awaited Green Paper says something about it—although I suppose that is a long way away. Finally, in many health sectors there are the royal colleges—the Royal College of GPs, the Royal College of Physicians and so on. Would it not be right if social care workers, both in care homes and in the domiciliary sector, had a royal college of social care to speak for them? Would that not be a good idea? It would be able to fight their corner better than it is being fought at the moment.