Care (Older People)

Tony Baldry Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2011 Westminster Hall

[Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

I am definitely going to send for a subscription to “Elders With Attitude”. It sounds like a very commendable organisation.

An aspect of public policy that is far too little debated is the consequences of us all increasingly living with an ageing population. It was about two years after I was first elected that I heard the word “Alzheimer’s”, but if I go around a nursing home in my constituency now, pretty much everyone there is suffering from age-related dementia of some sort. In my brief comments, I shall relate that to the problem of delayed discharge, or what is known as bed blocking. That is where the system needs improving.

Money has tended to be allocated to local authorities based on population and a multiplier of deprivation indexes, but I am not sure that those formulae take sufficient account of the ageing population. When a person is old, their requirements for care and support do not depend on their social background, but that is not sufficiently recognised in the formula. In medicine, at one end people stay for ever-shorter periods of time in hospital—one can now do such things as hysterectomies by keyhole surgery, which was impossible a few years ago, so some people go into hospital and come out very quickly—but at the other end, some people go into hospital and stay longer; largely, they do not need to be there, but an appropriate place cannot be found for them.

I understood, for example in domiciliary care, that the introduction of individual budgets would give individuals more control over their care provision. One hoped that that would lead to more providers coming into the system, but I see no evidence of that in Oxfordshire. Likewise, I do not see, and would be very surprised to see, substantial, or indeed any, increase in nursing home provision on what there was 10 years ago.

If one thinks about it and visits nursing homes, one sees that the point about wages is a good one. In the past decade, most nursing homes in my patch have managed by employing—I mean this in no pejorative sense; it is just the reality—Filipinos and paying them the minimum wage. At the end of their training, they have then gone on to find work in the NHS, and even though, with the cap on non-EU migration, that has become increasingly difficult, nursing home providers find themselves squeezed. On the one hand, the amount of money they receive from local authorities for placements is getting ever tighter; on the other hand, their wage bills and regulatory costs are becoming ever greater. There is little incentive for existing nursing home providers to increase the size or the provision in their own nursing homes, and there is certainly very little incentive for any new providers to come into the marketplace. There is a certain amount that the NHS or primary care trusts can do to fund intermediate care beds, but there is a limit to that and the cost still falls on the NHS.

We need to take a much better grip. I am not entirely confident about who has a grip on domiciliary care and is trying to ensure that there are sufficient providers of day care for those who need it. If we are to avoid ever-increasing fractiousness between the NHS and the social service providers over the thorny issue of delayed discharge, we will have to give more thought to how to ensure that there are sufficient places in the nursing home and residential care sector.

I agree with the point made by the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) about enhancing the professionalism of care staff. Those who provide domiciliary care in residential care homes provide a very important personal service. We should look at ways to enhance their reputation and status and encourage more colleges to offer HNDs and other courses for care staff. We will require more people in care services in the future, so it needs to be seen as an honourable occupation to which people aspire and where there are the highest standards of professionalism. There are important questions that need to be answered about the funding for local authorities for social care and how, with that funding, they are able to support both sufficient nursing home places and sufficient domiciliary care places.

For some time, many nursing homes were able to cross-subsidise, using the fees from private residents to subsidise the fees from local authorities. What I see in my patch is, effectively, two types of nursing home provision. Some nursing homes are now almost entirely privately paid; they are very expensive and provide a very good service. That means, however, that the only source of income for those nursing homes that provide residential care for patients funded by local authorities is the money that they receive from local authorities. They are stretched extremely tight to deliver a good service and have little incentive to expand that service. If we do not get our policies right, all that will happen is that the NHS will spend significant sums of money keeping in hospital people who no longer need to be in hospital and who could be discharged if there were places to discharge them to safely and properly.