Adult Social Care (Adult Social Care Committee Report)

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Andrews and her committee on producing such an excellent and thought-provoking report. I will add a bit of my own experience; in my family, there is a person in receipt of social care and an unpaid carer, so I have lived with this issue, as it were, over some years.

I will talk about invisibility in a minute, but first I make a plea: we need more hard data on the nature of the field. I talked some years ago to a professor who pleaded desperately that we need the data so that we can make harder decisions. Most of it is based on estimates and a bit of speculation. Hard data would be extremely helpful.

I approve entirely of the recommendation that there should be a commissioner for care and support. I know that the Government do not like it; it might make the task of the Government and the Minister a bit more difficult, but it would be very healthy to have someone who can pull this together and be an advocate as the Children’s Commissioner is for children, as my noble friend Lord Bradley said. That would be a good move forward.

I turn to the invisibility of unpaid carers. One reason why they are invisible is that they do not have a voice, because they are so beaten down by day-to-day pressures. They can hardly surface at all, even to lead their own lives for a few minutes every day, so they do not have a voice to speak up. If they could, they would say many things with a lot of passion and emotion. Some of the people they care for are also not very articulate; they are too ill and vulnerable. The professional carers are so busy and underpaid that they too are invisible, because they cannot speak up either. The people who speak up in our society are those who have some space in their lives. People who do not cannot speak up.

I think £76 a week for an unpaid carer is derisory. I know one person—there must be many—who has had to give up all work to be a full-time unpaid carer, so she will not have a pension at all. Can a person live on £76.75 a week? If I have got the figure wrong, the Minister will correct me. There is also the stress that unpaid carers have to undergo and the difficulty of getting a break. Maybe once every two or three years they get a bit of respite care; most of us get a good holiday and we do not even work under such pressure. Goodness me, unpaid carers do. Some of them work flat out virtually seven days a week, so it is no wonder that they need respite care so much, but they get it very seldom.

We need a workforce plan for professional carers. We need to make what they do a profession, with training and a decent level of pay. We need a plan to look at how the whole sector operates and why there is such a low rate of retention—at why it is easier for a paid carer to stack shelves in a supermarket because they can earn more money. Stacking shelves in the supermarket is important, but what sort of society are we when that forced preference is imposed on some unpaid carers? We need a workforce plan.

Finally, there is a need for independence. People can be properly independent by being at home as much as possible and by having the support to lead their lives there. Surely that must be the aim. It is a great report and I hope it will make a difference.