Adult Social Care Funding

Philippa Whitford Excerpts

Thursday 6th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine]

I thank my hon. Friend for that. I think she knows that I will be in the vicinity of her constituency at some point over the next few months, and I would like to take her up on her offer. I wish her well in her current campaign.

The workforce is critical. Adult social care is a rapidly growing sector, and there are about 165,000 more adult social care jobs than there were in 2010. It is imperative that we get the right people into the right jobs, to deliver the improved quality of care and services that we all want to see. We are working closely with our delivery partner Skills for Care to improve the level of skills in the adult social care workforce, and we are making the profession more attractive with the introduction of the national living wage, from which up to 1.5 million people in the social care sector are expected to benefit. I might point out that that policy has come in only as a result of this Prime Minister and this Government.

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

I want to point out that the report rates 92% of services as good and 3% as outstanding on caring. That comes from the commitment of staff, who, sadly, have not been given a breaking of the 1% cap. The issue of safety has been raised, with one in four providers failing to provide safe care. That comes down to workforce and funding. Brexit threatens the workforce; as the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) said, there is a turnover of one in four. Funding has been reduced by 9%, and that has to be tackled.

Does the Minister recognise that one in five emergency admissions could be avoided if alternatives were provided? Although the measures are different in Scotland, delayed discharges are falling in Scotland while they are rising in England. Will he get rid of fragmentation and look at real integration of health and social care in the sustainability and transformation plan reorganisation?

[Steve Brine]

I said at the very start of my response, did I not, that we should salute the 1.4 million people who work in this country’s social care sector? We should also salute the families who support people who are in and out of care settings all the time. I did also say—I am grateful that the hon. Lady responded to this—that it does not surprise me that the caring side of the sector came out as one of the good bits in the report.

The hon. Lady spoke about keeping people out of the emergency setting, and that is absolutely what the STP process is about. We are one NHS, and there is one public sector. This is about the NHS getting delayed transfers of care right, but it is also about the work of local government. The STP process works at upper tier authority level as well as across the NHS—in my area of Hampshire, the NHS is working closely with Hampshire County Council—to deliver a one-system response. She is absolutely right, as usual, to point that out.