Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 30th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Rosser for adopting many of the terms of my amendment in Committee and for the eloquent way in which he introduced his amendment.

No one could doubt that social care is under pressure. The social care workforce is already facing a crisis, with more than 120,000 vacancies. According to our House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, in 2018, 1.4 million older people in England had an unmet care need. The committee found that publicly funded social care support is shrinking, as diminishing budgets have forced local authorities to limit the number of people who receive public social care.

We are in a vicious cycle: after decades of reviews and failed reforms, the level of unmet need in our care system increases; the pressure on unpaid carers grows stronger; the supply of care providers diminishes; and the strain on the care workforce continues. That is even without considering the impact of Covid, which has been huge, and before the new immigration controls come in at the end of the year.

I therefore remain bemused by the decision of the Home Office to exclude the great majority of care workers from the new health and care visa as a result of them not meeting either the income or the skills thresholds that have been set. My noble friend Lord Rosser mentioned the Minister’s comments at Second Reading. She has justified this by the need for employers to end what she described as “the easy option” of using migrant labour to undercut our own workforce “for far too long”. She also pointed to the advice of the Migration Advisory Committee, which has maintained that the problems in this sector are caused by a failure to offer competitive terms and conditions, in itself caused by a failure to have a sustainable funding model—although as my noble friend Lord Rosser today suggested, the committee’s latest report clearly shows that it is now developing a rather more nuanced position. I wonder why. In Committee, the Minister went further. She said:

“If people say that the response to the social care issue should be, ‘Well, employers should be allowed to bring in as many migrants as they want at the minimum wage,’ first, that does not sound like the low-wage problem of the social care sector is being dealt with and, secondly, it suggests that one of the groups that will really suffer from that is the social care workers.”—[Official Report, 7/9/20; col. 610.]


I do not need reminding of how important skilled care workers’ jobs are. Of course I want more people training and entering the care sector at a decent wage, but as my noble friend Lord Rosser said in Committee, you will not solve the care sector’s problems by suddenly snapping off its ability to recruit staff from abroad from the end of the year; all you will do is tip it into an even bigger crisis than it is in.

The Minister has never responded to the central point of my argument, which is that the major fault for the problem has to be laid at the Government’s door. This is a government-controlled sector. The Government are the main funder and regulator. They set the whole context in which the sector operates. They have had countless reviews, but refuse to come up with any solution. There is no sign of the long-promised Green Paper. Mencap said today that the sector needs a credible, well-thought-out and properly funded care workforce plan to create and maintain a sustainable social care workforce—I agree with that.

I want to come back to the Minister, because if she is saying that staff should pay more, I agree, but is she going to will the means? Will she commit to increase support to local authorities? What about self-funders? Does she think they should pay more? At Second Reading, I think, I pointed out that if you took the current lifetime pension allowance of just over £1 million and bought an annuity with it at age 60, you would not be able to cover the average nursing home fees. So can the Minister tell me whether the Chancellor is going to raise the lifetime pension allowance?

If the Home Office is convinced that the woes of the sector are entirely down to the sector itself, let it produce the evidence. Let the Minister agree to a rapid review of the funding of the care sector and the impact of Clause 1 in shutting off an extremely valuable source of labour for this important but vulnerable part of our society.