Unpaid Carers: Inequalities

Debate between Richard Foord and Stephen Kinnock

Thursday 20th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Care (Stephen Kinnock)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Anna Dixon) for securing this vital debate. I pay tribute to her for her career-long dedication to adult social care and so many of the issues we are debating today. I also pay tribute to all the powerful and moving contributions we have heard today, many about personal experience, engagement with constituents and the stories we hear every day about the pivotal role that unpaid carers play in our care system, which are truly inspiring and uplifting.

Every day, unpaid carers step up to sustain the health and wellbeing of millions of people across our country. Every day, they step up quietly and without expectation to support loved ones, neighbours and friends. I offer my heartfelt thanks, particularly on Carers Rights Day: thank you for the compassion, the commitment and the resilience you show.

As Minister for Care, it has been my priority to listen directly to unpaid carers through discussions with carers of all ages, including during Carers Week. I have heard at first hand the realities of balancing care, work, education and personal wellbeing. Those conversations have been moving, honest and often humbling. They have reinforced just how essential it is that we continue to recognise and support the people who provide so much care to so many, and who hold so much of our health and care system together.

As I said at the Carers UK “State of Caring” conference earlier this year, we have made genuine progress over the last three decades. The profile of the role of unpaid carers has undoubtedly grown, and awareness of their contribution is undoubtedly greater. Despite that, true equality of opportunity remains out of reach for far too many. My ambition is clear: that carers who want to work can do so without being penalised; that young carers can learn, develop and dream, just like their peers; and that caring must not lead to long-term damage to a person’s health, wealth or wellbeing.

The data shows the scale of the challenge: unpaid carers are 16% more likely to have multiple long-term health conditions, and providing just 10 hours of care a week can significantly reduce someone’s likelihood of being employed and increase their risk of loneliness. These pressures compound existing inequalities linked to gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background or age. We must continue to shine a light on these disparities, listen to carers’ voices and design support that genuinely helps them to thrive.

The Government remain committed to ensuring that unpaid carers receive the right support at the right time in the right way. Under our 10-year health plan, unpaid carers will be recognised as partners in preparing personalised care and support plans. Their practical knowledge and experience will help to shape more responsive and realistic plans for the people they support.

Early identification remains key. Too many carers still go unnoticed and unsupported. We will increase the information captured across the health and care system, enabling earlier intervention and more tailored help. We will also introduce a dedicated “My Carer” section in the NHS app, which will allow carers to book appointments, access information and communicate more effectively with clinical teams. That will not only support carers but streamline interactions across the system.

Our shift towards a neighbourhood health service will increase the integration of health and care services, and it will bring multidisciplinary teams—GPs, nurses, social care professionals, pharmacists and others—closer to people’s homes. Working alongside unpaid carers, these teams will be better placed to deliver joined-up, community-centred support, focused on the health and care that people really need.

We know that caring can have a profound impact on mental health. That is why we are expanding access to talking therapies and digital tools, and piloting neighbourhood mental health centres, offering round-the-clock support for people with more severe needs.

[Richard Foord]

Can I ask the Minister what definition of neighbourhood he is using, and does it recognise communities such as market towns?

[Stephen Kinnock]

As a ballpark figure, we are looking at 50,000 residents, but we will be open to developing multi-neighbourhood infrastructure that would cover closer to something like 250,000 residents. It will depend, to some extent, on how it works in the 43 pilot sites in our neighbourhood health implementation plan. We do not want to have too many top-down diktats like the disastrous 2012 Lansley reforms; this is much more about a bottom-up, organic approach to developing a neighbourhood health service. Approximately 50,000 residents will be the starting point.

Jhoots Pharmacy

Debate between Richard Foord and Stephen Kinnock

Wednesday 15th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

That is an excellent suggestion; I will do that. We are hearing colleague after colleague say that staff are not being paid, and if there is clear evidence of a breach of employment law, we absolutely need to look at that. I will follow up on my hon. Friend’s suggestion.

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

We have heard again this afternoon the line from the Minister that pharmacy staff are employed not by the NHS but by pharmacy businesses, and that this is just a dispute between staff and the pharmacy business that should be raised in the first instance with ACAS. Holli Froggatt from Sidmouth, a former member of Jhoots staff, has written to me to say that staff have emailed Jhoots begging for their wages as they have empty bank accounts. In normal circumstances, the Government like to lean on pharmacies to take the pressure off GPs, with such schemes as Pharmacy First, so how can the Minister simply wash his hands of this situation when staff have gone for three months without pay?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I do not think that is an accurate characterisation of what I am saying. I am saying that we are taking action against Jhoots from the regulatory point of view, and there is clearly a glaring issue with the payment of staff. That needs to be taken forward through the industrial relations process, both through ACAS and the PDA. We will give all the support we can to both those organisations to ensure that Jhoots is held to account.

Access to Dentistry: Somerset

Debate between Richard Foord and Stephen Kinnock

Tuesday 1st April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Kinnock]

I absolutely agree. Two big things need to happen. First, the General Dental Council needs to do more to get more exams in place for those very well-qualified dentists. Of course, they have to pass the British exam. We cannot have people practising in Britain who have not passed that exam, but the availability of the exam has been too limited and that needs to change. The other thing is provisional registration. Some work can be done to expedite the registration of an international dentist, but more needs to be done on that as well. I will meet the head of the General Dental Council shortly, and I will convey those messages to him.

Recruitment and retention issues are not limited to dentists; there are difficulties across the whole dental team, including dental nurses, hygienists, therapists and technicians. In the past five years, there has been a 15% reduction in courses of dental treatment being delivered across England, and 28% of adults in England—a staggering 13 million people—have an unmet need for NHS dentistry. As a result, we hear too many stories about people who are unable to access the care they need, and some horrific accounts of DIY dentistry that nobody should have to resort to.

Dentistry rightly receives a lot of attention because of its dismal state, and I am grateful to the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee for their interest in the previous Government’s dentistry recovery plan. It is evident that the plan did not go far enough.

[Richard Foord]

The Minister talks about the previous Government’s dental recovery plan, and part of that was to impose a firmer ringfence on dentistry spending so that there was not an underspend that was reallocated elsewhere. The previous Government tasked NHS England with collecting monthly returns from ICBs to establish spending as against the allocation. Now that NHS England is being scrapped, will we still see that monitoring of ICBs to ensure that the spending matches the allocation?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point about the ringfence, but in a way, ringfencing addresses the symptoms, rather than the cause, of the problem. The fundamental cause of the problem is the amateurish way in which the previous Government set up the NHS dentistry contract so that it does not incentivise dentists to do NHS work. That is what leads them to drift off. In a sense, we can do all the ringfencing we like, but if the workforce that we need is not incentivised to do the work that we need them to do, we are going to have that problem, because they vote with their feet. That is why the radical overhaul of the dentistry contract is the key point. However, I agree with the hon. Gentleman that once we have got a contract that works, we must ensure that every penny that is committed to NHS dentistry is spent on NHS dentistry, rather than the absurd situation that we have now, in which we constantly have underspends in the NHS dentistry contract while demand for NHS dentistry goes through the roof. It is a truly bizarre situation.

I return to the subject of the dentistry recovery plan. The new patient premium, introduced by the previous Government, aimed to increase the number of new patients seen, but that has not happened. In reality, since the introduction of the previous Government’s plan, there has been a 3% reduction in the number of treatments delivered to new patients. It is clear to this Government that stronger action is needed, and we are prepared to act to stop the decay.