Care Homes for Older People

Peter Heaton-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)]

I am delighted to have secured this debate about the regulation, inspection and complaints process for care homes for elderly people. Let me be clear about something from the start. In half an hour on a Thursday afternoon, it is not my intention to tackle the huge, overarching issue of social care provision in this country.

--- Later in debate ---

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Andrew Griffiths.)

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

Members on both sides of the House know that social care provision is one of the biggest challenges that we face, but that debate must be for another day. My debate is about something very specific: the way in which privately run care homes for elderly people are inspected and regulated, and the process that exists to raise complaints when relatives believe that something is going wrong. This is vital for two reasons. First, we are talking about nothing less than the welfare of vulnerable elderly people. Secondly, I believe it is possible to make significant improvements at relatively little cost, and I hope in the next 15 minutes or so to set out why.

Before I do so, I will provide a little background. Why have I taken up this cause? Three years ago, while I was still a mere parliamentary candidate, a local resident in North Devon told me a very moving story. John Barrass’s mother, Vera, a former resident at a private care home, died in 2009. Mr Barrass had serious concerns about the care she received in the final weeks of her life, and believed that a poor system of inspection, regulation and complaint handling was a significant factor. Specifically, he believed that a mechanism did not exist to allow him satisfactorily to raise his concerns about shortcomings in his mother’s care.

I do not seek to reopen that case, and neither does my constituent. In the years since his mother died, Mr Barrass pursued all avenues available to him to have her case fully investigated. He invariably hit a brick wall, so he began to look beyond his individual circumstances to examine instead the more general question of how care homes are inspected and regulated, and how complaints are dealt with. He came to the conclusion that the system was simply not fit for purpose, and he met me to explain why. That was the birth of a long campaign, which reaches another milestone with this debate.

Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of my raising this matter in Westminster Hall on 4 November 2015. Since then, I believe we have made some progress, but much of what I said at the time still stands today. What I have to say is based largely on a report produced by Mr Barrass, which I have here, called “Care means care, Justice in care”. The report was created in memory of his late mother Vera who, in Mr Barrass’s words,

“spent a nightmare in care,”

which led him to spend seven years producing this document.

I have helped Mr Barrass to take this to the very top. The previous Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the former Member for Witney, received a copy and arranged a meeting with the former Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt). I am delighted to see him in the Chamber and pay tribute to him for the work that he did in this area, and for his sincere engagement with me and this campaign. Recently, the document was sent to the current Prime Minister. I quote Mr Barrass’s letter to her:

“I cannot bring my mother back or stop what I have agonisingly had to witness and go through, but I can try to stop this happening to others”.

I agree. An estimated 300,000 older people currently live in some 15,000 registered care homes in England. The average age of those people is 85, and a significant proportion suffer from dementia. They are largely without a voice, and that needs to change.

[Jeremy Quin (Horsham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his campaign and his persistence with it. The matter affects many of us in this House; my constituents are still concerned about Orchid View care home and the issues that arose out of that. Does he agree that we have to learn from the mistakes of the past? We should have proper inquiries and proper investigations, and we should learn from those mistakes.

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

I thank my hon. Friend; I am sure that the Minister will have heard his comments. We need to move forward, and when things go wrong, we need to put them right.

The body responsible for the regulation and inspection of care homes is the Care Quality Commission, with which I have worked closely since launching this campaign. I believe that it is listening, but there is still considerable room for improvement. Today, the CQC’s website tells us that of the 448 care homes it has inspected most recently, a staggering 200—45%—have been rated as “requires improvement” or “inadequate”. There is no reason to believe that those figures are unrepresentative of the sector as a whole, which means that more than four in 10 of all establishments are not reaching the required standard. Surely the purpose of any system of inspection and regulation must be to drive up standards. The figures alone suggest that the current system simply is not working.

In June 2013, the CQC issued a consultation called, “A new start”, which proposed a whole new approach to inspection across all sectors, including care homes. That approach was confirmed in October 2013, and the new inspection regime was introduced. I broadly welcome it, but there are still huge question marks over its implementation. The original deadline for carrying out an initial inspection of all care homes was February 2016. However, in July 2015, the National Audit Office found that just 9% of care homes had been assessed because of a shortfall of about 160 inspectors. Not surprisingly, the original February 2016 deadline to complete the work was not going to be met, so it was pushed back to this October—last month. Yesterday, when my office asked the CQC for an update, it told us that it is

“committed to completing the first phase of the comprehensive inspection programme by March 2017”.

In other words, this new deadline—the third—is more than a year later than the original target.

I absolutely recognise that the CQC faces many challenges. The managers and inspectors are working hard, but my point is that we would not accept a delay of more than a year in the inspection of NHS services, so we should not accept it just because we are dealing with private sector care homes. We are still talking about vulnerable people who might well be suffering. We need to get a grip on this problem and to challenge the CQC to undertake its inspection programme in as timely a way as possible. I seek to be helpful when I say, “Let us, as a Government, work with the CQC to ensure that it delivers what seems to me to be such an important inspection programme without further delays.”

That brings me to another major area of concern: the CQC’s role in handling complaints, and indeed the role of myriad organisations and authorities involved in this area. What can someone do if they fear that an elderly relative is being neglected or mistreated, or is not being given the right healthcare? What can they do if they fear that their relative’s life might even be in danger, and the care home provider has dismissed the complaint or will not even listen to it?

When things go wrong, and a member of the public needs to make a complaint against a care home, they are faced with a bewildering labyrinth, and that needs to change. The website of the CQC, the body responsible for the regulation, says that the CQC

“is unable to investigate individual complaints”

against providers. To many people, that will seem odd.

Many people are in care homes commissioned by their local authority, so that offers another route for making a complaint. However, the complaints procedures in many local authorities—I speak as a former councillor in a unitary borough—consist of several layers, shall we say, and such a system does not lend itself to a speedy resolution. Not all people in care homes are in places paid for by local authorities, but even if they were, their complaint may fail to get through those many layers.

Should such an individual go to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman? Again, no, because that is another brick wall. The ombudsman says:

“By law the Ombudsman cannot look into complaints about privately funded healthcare.”

There is another possibility, which is an organisation called the Independent Healthcare Sector Complaints Adjudication Service. The ombudsman’s website states that people “may”—I stress that word—“have the option” of going to that organisation, which covers some independent healthcare providers, but if the healthcare provider of the person concerned is not one of them, they are stuck.

In a nutshell, the system is bewildering. It lacks accountability and transparency, and would leave most people confused and frustrated. People simply do not know who to turn to when they are worried that something is not right. Given that level of confusion, let us imagine what the situation is like for people whose elderly relative is in a care home. They are worried and in an emotional state, yet still have to deal with an incredibly complex complaints procedure.

I believe we could solve this quickly and cheaply, simply by requiring every care home to display a standard notice clearly setting out the complaints procedure with the relevant contact details. It seems incredible—I use the word in its literal sense—that that is not already mandatory. I ask the Minister to investigate with the CQC the possibility of producing such a notice. Something that simple really could make a huge difference.

As for the longer term, in the document I referred to earlier, my constituent John Barrass is convinced that we need one body only to investigate, regulate and handle complaints about care homes, with that being its one and only purpose. That suggestion deserves serious consideration.

A further problem thrown up by this entire process has been highlighted effectively by an organisation in Devon—not in my constituency, as it happens, but elsewhere in the county—called Your Voice Matters. I pay tribute to its founder and director, Jenny Moore, who has done very good work in this area. I have met her a number of times, most recently yesterday, in preparation for this debate. The issue in question is the growing number of cases where relatives are banned from care homes simply for complaining. This can take the form of a complete ban or of restricted visits; in some cases, it has even been known to lead to the eviction of the elderly person from the home.

Your Voice Matters has launched a good campaign called “Rights 2 Speak Up 4 Care”. It has identified the issue succinctly. In a nutshell, it is that private care homes are defined in law as ultimate landlords. Quite simply, they can decide who goes on the premises and who does not. Families who raise concerns are threatened or banned. As I have said, sometimes residents are evicted, and a private paying resident is not protected under any legislation—not the Health and Social Care Act 2012 nor the Human Rights Act 1998, for example. A private care home also has the power to prevent health professionals from visiting the home. Let us think about that for a moment: a care home has the power to stop doctors and nurses going into it to visit its clients.

Something has to change. Recommendations from Your Voice Matters include legislation to close those loopholes and to give protection to all residents and their families, a review of the relevant legislation and an independent panel to offer a fair hearing should a private care home want to place restrictions on a family member or a resident. Your Voice Matters has been working on this for some time, and literally yesterday—just yesterday—there was something of a breakthrough. In the run-up to this debate, there has been a flurry of media activity, with TV and radio programmes covering the issue. Yesterday, the CQC published new guidelines on its website. Care homes will now be required to keep a register of any occasions when relatives are banned or people are evicted. I am not convinced that that goes far enough, but it is a start, and I will keep working with Your Voice Matters to ensure that we go further.

That campaign group has made a number of other recommendations that I will mention briefly, as they have considerable merit. It suggests there should be better protection for whistleblowers who wish to highlight shortcomings in homes, as well as better training, with a mandatory training course for all those who work in or manage care homes.

I have referred several times to my constituent Mr John Barrass. He has carried out an investigation lasting seven years but, as he says, he is only one of the 65 million little people in the UK—those are his words—who are very rarely listened to but whose experiences, and what they have witnessed and suffered, should not be ignored any more. He says:

“I just wish we had been raising these issues before mum had this serious stroke, and helped to change the care system. Maybe, just maybe, my mother would not have had to go through what she did and my father and I would not have gone through 11 years of suffering.”

I want to leave enough time for us to hear from the Minister, but let me be clear about one further thing before I conclude. Many fantastic caring professionals work in care homes. They do their jobs on low wages and care brilliantly for many people. The owners and managers of many care homes are committed to providing the best possible service. They face all the pressures of running a small business and the costs that that entails. There are good managers, investigators and staff at the CQC. I do not wish to criticise those who are doing well, but I do seek to call out those who need to do better.

I should briefly mention the many organisations and individuals who contacted me in advance of the debate. I am unable to name them all, but I have received good representations from the British Medical Association, Independent Age, Hootvox, which is an organisation looking at ways to measure the success or otherwise of care homes, and many other individuals and constituents.

I end with this thought. The problem is that we have a growing number of cases in which care homes are simply not coming up to scratch. I have spent many days, weeks and months on this, discussing it with my constituent John Barrass and the Your Voice Matters campaign group in Devon. Whenever we discuss it, we keep coming back to one thing. I said exactly this a year ago in Westminster Hall and I say it again now: this is not about processes, systems or organisations, but about people—people who do not have a voice in a system in which, let us remember, four in 10 care homes fail to reach a satisfactory standard on the CQC’s measures. That means that some vulnerable, sick and elderly people are not being properly cared for. That cannot be right. I look forward to hearing from the Minister. We have to do something and we have to act now.