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

Nick Thomas-Symonds Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

The personal assistants employed by disabled people help with tasks such as travel, writing and communications, in addition to providing personal care. They come with a variety of skills, which are very much dependent on the unique needs of the disabled person. They are a growing workforce within the wider social care workforce, particularly as more disabled people live independently and are in need of personalised support to enable them to learn, work and live their own lives.

Personal assistants are partially or wholly funded by the state, either from personal social care budgets or from personal health budgets. Direct payments—personal social care budgets—were first introduced for adults in 1997 by the Community Care (Direct Payments) Act 1996, and for older people in 2000. The Care Act 2014 made it mandatory for local authorities to provide direct payments to individuals who needed and were eligible to receive them.

In 2015, the Department of Health defined a direct payment as follows:

“A payment of money from the local authority to either the person needing care and support, or to someone else acting on their behalf, to pay for the cost of arranging all or part of their own support. This ensures the adult can take full control over their own care.”

That gives considerable discretion to the person in receipt of the budget as to how they deploy it, but many people use it, in whole or in part, to employ a personal assistant to enable them to live an independent life.

After a fairly slow start, the number of people receiving direct payments increased rapidly, from 65,000 in 2008 to 235,000 in 2014. Many of those adults chose directly to employ their own staff rather than use traditional adult social care services. Skills for Care estimates that, by 2016, around 70,000 of the 235,000 adults and older people receiving a direct payment employed their own staff directly, creating around 145,000 personal assistant jobs between them. Until that point, however, relatively little was known about the make-up of that part of the adult social care sector workforce.

Skills for Care has conducted new research into this subject, and we now know that there are approximately 200,000 personal assistants working in the UK. That figure is based on information from the national minimum dataset collected by Skills for Care and on the number of people in England using personal health budgets to employ personal assistants. We also know that, in 2018, 8% of the total social care workforce were non-UK nationals. The exact figures for personal assistants are not known, but it is fair to assume that a similar percentage applies.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)]

I commend my hon. Friend on the speech she is making. Does she agree that, although the issue of personal assistants is important, there is the wider issue of the impact on the care sector as a whole of a minimum threshold of £30,000 per annum?

[Kate Green]

Indeed I do. Research by Global Future, for example, points starkly to the gap in the social care workforce today, the growth of that gap as a consequence of demographic change, and the potential implications of the proposals in the Government’s White Paper. I will say a little more about that in a moment, and colleagues may wish to expand on it, too.

In respect of personal assistants, if we assume that the percentage of that workforce mirrors that of the social care workforce as a whole, we could assume that perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 are non-UK nationals, including European economic area nationals. That covers only personal assistants employed to provide social care; I have no information on the breakdown by nationality of personal assistants employed by holders of personal health budgets. However, there are a total of 42,000 personal assistants employed by holders of personal health budgets, which might suggest, if the proportion of non-UK nationals is similar to that in social care, a further 3,000 to 4,000 people.

My amendment seeks to address the concern about the ongoing ability of disabled people to recruit this important workforce after Brexit if the proposals in the Minister’s White Paper, particularly those relating to the salary threshold, came into effect. Wherever personal assistants are employed, they are a vital resource for disabled people, whose lives would be very difficult without them—especially, for example, those who live in isolated rural communities where it is difficult to get end-to-end social care.

Many—perhaps the vast majority or even all—of these personal assistants earn way less than £30,000 per year. Typically, many will earn only half that. As I have said, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen pointed out, the sector as a whole already faces severe pressure. Skills for Care says there are approximately 110,000 unfilled vacancies in the sector at any one time. Global Future’s research points to growing pressures as a result of a changing demographic, which, combined with the provisions of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, this Bill and the proposals in the White Paper, could lead to a shortfall in the workforce of perhaps 400,000 by 2026, including a shortfall in the number of personal assistants. At the present rate of recruitment it would take us 20 years to make up that gap.

This workforce was considered in detail by the Migration Advisory Committee in the report it published last year. While acknowledging the shortfall, the MAC suggested that it could be made up in a number of different ways were access not available to EEA nationals to fill vacancies in the labour force—for example, by persuading former care workers to come back into the sector or by improving retention rates.

However, MAC also says that if the fundamental problem of recruitment and retention in the sector relates to pay and conditions, the only way we can use alternatives to recruiting non-UK nationals—indeed, even if we are recruiting EEA nationals—lies in improving pay and conditions across the sector, which will require substantial funding from the Government. In any event, it would take an heroic effort by the Government and the sector to fill that workforce gap without access to EEA nationals, not least as this demographic time bomb is ticking right here, right now.

For disabled people who employ personal assistants, this could be disastrous. They need committed, skilled carers. They need continuity of care; they cannot afford to have people coming in and out of the workforce. They need certainty and reliability. Therefore, there are real concerns that, if a skills threshold were imposed or, most importantly for this amendment, if a salary threshold of £30,000 applied, they might be forced to look to fill vacancies using people on short-term work visas who would not have the skills or be able to provide the continuity of care.

Governments of all colours have long supported the concept of personal budgets as a facilitative means to support independent living for disabled people. It would be a crying shame if the ambitions that the Government set out in their White Paper and the provisions of this Bill worked against that aim. I hope the Minister will, in the course of our debate, be able to offer some words of reassurance to personal assistants and, most importantly, to the disabled people who employ them.