Social Care Reform

Sarah Owen Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), a formidable campaigner in Parliament on such issues, on securing the debate. Social care should have been at the forefront of the mind of every single Member of Parliament as we witnessed our care homes face some of the worst times during the pandemic, as carers put their own health and lives at risk to care for our loved ones. I pay tribute to them.

Let me declare an interest: I have been a care worker. It was a while ago, but things have not got better—the same challenges have gone unchecked or, sadly, are worse. I hope that I can give voice, in Parliament, to those fantastic overworked and underpaid workers.

As we have seen throughout the pandemic, it is women and black, Asian and minority ethnic workers who have risked the most and been hardest hit. To put that into context, 82% of people working in social care are women, and about 247,000 of them are from overseas.

Our social care system is beyond overstretched. We have been fighting the pandemic with 117,000 fewer care staff than we need, and absences have trebled over the past year. We need to future-proof our social care system from future pandemics. This cannot happen again. Social care has to be well paid, a secure career with the strong terms and conditions that our healthcare heroes deserve. Such people are not unskilled. I never want to hear Ministers talking about them like that again. I challenge anyone who thinks otherwise to spend a day in a carer’s shoes.

Over the past year, I have heard terrible testimonies from care workers who were told that they needed to come into work even when they had symptoms, putting at risk not just their own health, but the health of those they care for. We cannot have the obscene situation in which even in a pandemic, they only get £95.85 a week to live on for sick pay. The Health Secretary has admitted he could not live on that; we should not expect the people who look after our loved ones to live on that when they get sick either.

At the heart of any changes, we should hear from the people who need care. They should have a choice and control over who is in their life, who supports them and what the future of social care looks like.

Report after report has said that things need to change. The Health and Social Care Committee published radical proposals for social care last month, just as it did before the last election. My own party put a joined-up national health and social care service, free at the point of use, in our last manifesto, and in the manifesto before that, the one before that and the one before that. The Conservative party promised reform in 2010 and again in 2015. Then, nearly two years ago, the Prime Minister stood on the steps of Downing Street to promise,

“we will fix the crisis in social care once and for all”.

Clearly, from all the speeches today, there is the political will to fix this broken system. People should not have to give up everything in their old age because they need social care. Social care staff who fought the virus with everything they have do not need to be paid a pittance for some of the toughest work that can be imagined. People can and must have dignity. My plea to the Minister is, let us look after the people who have been on the frontline of the pandemic and work together finally to fix social care in our country.