Social Care

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, social care is the Passchendaele of the welfare state. It is now 25 years since I sat on the royal commission on this subject. Since then, there has been a veritable snowstorm of excellent reports—including the two in front of us today—with, often, government promises and, sometimes, government policy statements. However, all have melted the moment they touched the ground.

I cannot hope to cover the whole subject in the time available to me so I will concentrate on one issue that is very close to my heart. After that royal commission, my noble friend Lord Boateng called me into his office; he was in charge of funding long-term care. He asked me a very good question: “If you had a bit of money to spend in the social care field, where would you spend it?” I replied, unhesitatingly, “On increasing the pay of social care workers.” Then, I said by £1 an hour; now, it would be more like £2. It is a scandal what goes on now for both the workers involved and the people for whom they care.

In January this year, Skills for Care reported that 10.9% of posts—around 170,000 of them—were vacant, meaning people will not be properly cared for. According to the latest figures, a care worker in the independent sector earns £9.66 an hour; in local authorities, it is £11.03. Care workers’ pay has dropped behind that in other sectors. In 2012-13, retail assistants earned 16p an hour less than care workers; today, they get 21p an hour more. One care manager is quoted by the Commons Health and Social Care Committee as saying:

“I dread hearing Aldi opening up nearby, as I know I will lose staff.”


Being a social care worker does not just involve hard skills, though there are those. It also involves soft skills in getting on with people. Do we really want those soft skills transferred to behind cashier points in supermarkets?

There are also problems of low promotion. People love the job but cannot see the way forward. There is also the problem of local authority finance. Councils are trying to push care home fees down. Homes make it work because they charge the councils the marginal cost of putting up with someone and get the rest of the money back off the private payers. The Government said that they would tackle this. Can the Minister kindly tell us where they have got to? I would be most grateful.

This problem is going to get worse and worse, for the simple reason of demographics—an increasing elderly population with increasing care needs. The overall population in England grew by 7% in the 10 years between 2011 and 2021. The number of people aged 85 or over rose by 16%, so nearly three times as fast. Many of those people will need care. By 2038, 57% more adults in the population will be 65 or over, compared with today. How are we going to care for them?

I make this final point. There is a crude choice in social care. You can spend the money that you have available on helping people to pay their care home fees, which helps the top half of the population, or you can spend it on providing better care. The Government plan to prioritise a cap. Fortunately, the proposal for that has now been ditched, or postponed indefinitely. However, they should have prioritised the first, with better care for all, starting with better care for those who give their lives to these difficult but rewarding tasks.