Social Care and the Role of Carers

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I should first declare an interest, in that my son has MS and his wife is his full-time carer, although my wife and I have also helped out at intervals. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, for the clear way in which she set out the argument.

The crisis in social care existed before Covid and will exist long after Covid unless we take urgent action. This is no time to tinker at the edges; we have to deal with it fundamentally. My noble friend Lord Rooker gave good examples of how to fund social care. The Government could take those to heart; they would probably work. We have heard successive promises from the Government. The usual argument for delay is that they cannot do anything because of Covid. It is time that these promises stopped and the Government got on with it.

We have all heard how, in the residential and domiciliary social care sector, there is low pay, poor status and desperate staff shortages. Then we have the unpaid carers: I do not know how many there are, but estimates vary between 4 million and 13 million people. I have also seen an estimate that they are worth £100 billion a year, given the contributions that they make. Besides that, the actual cost of social care, large as it is, has to be seen in proportion. Unpaid carers have often given up their jobs and work long hours. They are desperate for respite care. A week’s respite care for a full-time unpaid carer is worth its weight in gold. It can change her—it is usually a woman—attitude to life, give her a lease of energy and enable her to go on doing the difficult job she is doing. We have to be reconciled to the fact that demand for social care is going to increase, partly because we are living longer and partly because of dementia and other illnesses. We need to prepare for an increase, not just try to cope with the present demand.

If run effectively, social care would actually save the National Health Service money by reducing pressure on hospital beds. I wonder how many people are occupying a hospital bed because there is not the care and support in the local community. I do not blame local authorities for that; they do a fantastic job and a pretty difficult one. But I will say that the forms one has to fill in to apply for social care are formidable. They still run to pages and pages; I think one needs two PhDs to fill them in. They are pretty difficult for people, but there it is.

We also need better data and statistics on the whole social care sector if we are to make sensible decisions about the future. I do not believe those exist. Sometimes local authorities get together to share their statistics, but I think the Minister will confirm that we could do with better data and statistics. Finally, I believe that we need a national care service, parallel to the National Health Service and introduced with all the imagination shown by the 1945 Labour Government when they introduced it.