Social Care

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Wednesday 25th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

Thank you for keeping the best until last, Mr Speaker. It is a great honour to speak in this very important debate.

The care home market, both for residential and nursing care, is dominated by the private sector, which holds 86% of all places. It is divided between lucrative self-pay homes and those with local government-funded residents, which are really struggling to cover the growing costs of caring for a population that is living longer, with more complex health needs. Many councils are struggling just to meet their statutory duties on a reduced budget. The Government’s decision to push a crisis of their own making on to local government is helping nobody. Central Government funding is totally inadequate. That is why, despite the new funding that has been made available for adult social care, there will still be a funding gap of £2.2 billion by 2020. I hope that this is addressed in the delayed Green Paper.

The Government must accept that their over-reliance on the private sector is not solving the problems in the social care sector and all too often is making them worse. In the last few days, Allied Healthcare has issued warnings and is now searching for a rescue plan. The company cited a rise in the cost of nurses and doctors as a result of tighter immigration rules and a shortage of trainees—problems that were created wholly by Government policy. Across the sector, providers and councils are reporting difficulties in recruiting from overseas because of the hostile environment created by our Prime Minister.

One of the nine priorities in the Government’s “Shared delivery plan: 2015 to 2020” is to

“make sure the health and care system workforce has the right skills and the right number of staff in the most appropriate settings to provide consistently safe and high-quality care.”

A report by the National Audit Office published in February shows the extent to which the Government have failed on this. The high turnover rates and difficulty recruiting that the NAO reports can be traced back to central Government underfunding. A cash-starved state is forced to tender contracts for services that private companies can deliver only by paying low wages, cutting corners or exploiting their workforce with zero- hours contracts and unpaid travel time. The Green Paper is an opportunity for the Government to go back to the drawing board on social care funding. Councils need a sustainable settlement, and we need to see adult social care given parity with the health service. Surely this joined-up thinking was why the Department of Health was renamed the Department of Health and Social Care.