Adult Social Care: Long-term Workforce Plan

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

My noble friend is right that it is important that we have a workforce built around the needs of patients, rather than patients having to be worked around the needs of the workforce. I certainly hope and intend that, as we go forward, we will see much more of this flexibility. I share her view that time is of the essence and I also know that my noble friend and your Lordships’ House also understand that it is very important that we get this right.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, the turnaround rate for social care staff was about 30% last year, so retention is clearly an important issue. However, the Government have not helped the situation since July by cutting £115 million from the adult social care training budget. What will the Government do to mitigate this cut and try to help retention within such a vital service?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

Retention is absolutely crucial. I was looking—as I know the noble Lord also does—at the vacancy rates and they are currently running at some 131,000. However, I was interested to note that they are not actually the best measure of capacity, or lack of it, because those vacancies can reflect new roles and short-term vacancies because of anticipated staff turnover. So I have had to rein myself in when looking at the relevance of vacancy rates.

On retention, there is a whole range of factors. In the immediate, I say to the noble Lord that we are professionalising the workforce by expanding the national career structure and have developed and launched a level 2 adult social care certificate qualification.