Social Care Reform

Debate between Rupa Huq and Barbara Keeley

Thursday 18th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered social reform and the social care workforce.

It is good to have you in the Chair for this important debate, Dr Huq. I am pleased to open the debate. I pay tribute to the House staff who have enabled Westminster Hall debates to return with virtual participation.

The covid-19 pandemic has exposed the failings of our social care system. With more than 30,000 deaths of care home residents, the care sector has been hit hard over the past year. However, the fundamental problems in social care long predate the pandemic. A decade of underfunding meant that we were in a situation, even before the pandemic, where 1.5 million people were not getting the social care they needed. While social care is, rightly, the last thing to be cut by local councils, the reality is that areas that have seen half of their central funding cut since 2010 are left with little choice. Underfunding has led to fewer care packages, cuts to care packages and providers being asked to take contracts that do not even cover their costs.

One clear illustration of how this is going wrong can be found in long-stay in-patient wards, where 2,000 autistic people and people with learning disabilities are detained, at enormous cost to the NHS. One reason for that is the lack of resources in the community to support them. When local authorities cannot afford care and support in the community for autistic people and people with learning disabilities, it becomes easier to put them into inappropriate NHS in-patient units, even though community support would be cheaper and more appropriate. We also have older people forced to sell their homes because they are unable to access publicly funded care support until they have exhausted almost all their assets.

There has been much focus on care in care homes during the pandemic, due of course to the tragic death toll among people living in those homes, but we must also focus on the fact that social care is needed by working-age disabled people too, and that proposals for reform must cover their needs. In fact, one in three users of publicly funded care is under the age of 65, whereas only one in four is an older person in a care home, so the crisis in our care system affects more than vulnerable older people. It is a crisis not only of catastrophic costs, but of hundreds of thousands of people being denied the opportunity to live their lives as they would choose.

This is not a new problem. The reality is that social care has been struggling for more than a decade now. That is why the last Labour Government published a White Paper in 2010 proposing major reforms to the way social care is delivered and funded. However, once in government after the 2010 general election, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition decided to drop those proposals in favour of starting another commission on reform. That led to the provisions of the Care Act 2014, including legislating for a lifetime cap on care costs, based on the recommendations of the Dilnot commission. That would have addressed some of the issues with the social care system, although I do not think any of us believed that it was anything like the full solution. Since that change was first delayed by the new Conservative Government in 2015, we have had any number of promises of future reform.

Ahead of the 2017 election, the then Prime Minister promised far-reaching reforms but promptly abandoned them. After that election, a Green Paper was promised by the end of 2017. At the end of 2017, the cap on care costs was completely abandoned and a new deadline of mid-2018 was set for the Green Paper. That was pushed back to autumn 2018, and then to the end of 2018. In early 2019, we were told to expect a Green Paper by April 2019.

When the current Prime Minister took office, he claimed to have a social care plan ready to go, and he repeated that claim during the 2019 general election. The Conservatives’ manifesto at the last election said that they would seek a “cross-party consensus”, but they have not tried to seek that consensus. In fact, a fairly broad consensus on the future of social care has developed. Politicians from across the spectrum, including the Health and Social Care Committee and the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, have endorsed the model of free personal care as introduced by Labour in Scotland. That system is not perfect, but it should be a strong position to start from. However, rather than acting on that consensus, we are still waiting for proposals nearly 18 months after the 2019 election.

When the Minister speaks, she may tell us that the Government are working hard on their proposals and will publish them shortly. She would be the third Minister of State to tell me that since the Government dropped their commitment to the cap on care costs, and we have already missed at least 10 deadlines for reform. That simply is not good enough. We need action now, not the promise of jam tomorrow.

If there is a team of civil servants working on this issue, there a few points that they should consider in order for reform of social care to work. First, reform must deliver a fair deal for care staff. If the crisis of the pandemic showed us anything, it was that without the hard work put in by care staff our care system simply would not work, but too often care staff are underpaid, undervalued and given few opportunities to progress. To fill the more than 100,000 vacancies we have for care staff, social care needs to become a career of choice, with better pay and conditions and better training. When the average starting salary is only £15,000, it is little wonder that people are not turning to a career in social care.

As a starting point, reform should mean that all care staff are paid the real living wage, as my own local authority of Salford is now doing. We need to see investment so that the social care sector offers training opportunities and real career progression for staff, recognising their skills and experience. If we are to fill the vacancies in social care, we need a wide strategy working across Departments to recruit and train the workforce that we need.

The Prime Minister has said that he wants to end the scandal of people needing to sell their homes in order to pay for care. It is right that we should address the issue of catastrophic costs, but that cannot be the only ambition of social care reform. If all we do is end catastrophic costs, we will still have nearly 2 million people not getting the support they need. With providers struggling to make ends meet, local authorities are left with no choice but to cut budgets even further.

We need reform that expands access to social care services. Over the past five years, we have seen fewer older people receiving care every year as eligibility thresholds have crept up in response to budget pressures. Preventive care is increasingly uncommon, with intervention mainly coming after a crisis. Rather than providing low-level support to enable people to continue living independently at home, we are increasingly providing care only once there is no prospect of someone living independently.

When the Health and Social Care Committee looked at access to care, one witness, Anna Severwright, told us:

“I feel that I am not able to live a normal life. I do not have enough hours”—

of care—

“to be able to go out at the weekends and in the evenings, and do a lot of the normal things that make life worth living.”

That is not good enough. People should not see their horizons limited solely because they need social care, but with budgets under ever-increasing pressure, money for anything other than the basics of care is rarely available. There is a better way to deliver social care than 15-minute care visits, and people should not have curfews on their lives because care is not available in the evening.

As well as funding care properly, we could embrace the spirit of the Care Act 2014 and ensure that care packages meet people’s social and emotional needs as well as their physical ones. That kind of person-centred support would enable more working-age disabled people to be productive members of society while also supporting older adults to enjoy later life. At root, social care should be about supporting people to live happy and fulfilled lives without facing financial ruin.

There is a very poor level of support for unpaid carers. There are 13.6 million people providing care to a friend or family member. Without them, our social care system would not cope. Funding for respite care is increasingly hard to get. Many carers say that they would use a respite break to attend a medical appointment.

Responding to an Adjournment debate that I led last Friday, the Minister for Patient Safety, Suicide Prevention and Mental Health said that

“45,000 carers have received respite or other carer support delivered to the person they care for.”—[Official Report, 12 March 2021; Vol. 690, c. 1212.]

We have 13.6 million unpaid carers, including 4.5 million who started caring during the pandemic. For a Health Minister to report that only 45,000 carers received respite care is an appalling record. We must do much more to support unpaid carers, and we could improve their lives by funding formal care services better.

It is now seven years since we put the Care Act into law, but the Government still have not delivered for people who use social care. After years of broken promises and delayed announcements, there is anger at the way social care has been underfunded and reform neglected. This has led to people who rely on social care going without the support they need to live fulfilling lives.

Underfunding has led to care staff being paid the minimum wage and not being given the time they need to provide high-quality care. It has also led to many thousands of people facing catastrophic costs of care, often having to sell their homes to pay for it, and over the past year it has meant 30,000 care home residents dying with covid-19. They were caught in a perfect storm of an NHS discharge policy that seeded infections into care homes before providers could implement infection control measures.

People who use social care deserve better than all of this. They deserve reform that delivers a fully funded, person-centred care system that meets their needs, and they need it now, not at some point in the distant future.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

Given the popularity of the debate, and the fact that we have three Front-Bench spokespeople and a concluding statement from Barbara Keeley at the end, I am going to start with a time limit of three and a half minutes. There will be a clock visible at the side of Members’ screens, and the chaps here can pull the plug if they go over the limit. With all that in mind, I will start with Andrew Lewer.