Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the job vacancy rates in social care in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (d) England; and what steps his Department is taking to increase the number of carers in the social care sector in those areas.

Skills for Care’s 2020/21 annual estimates of the vacancy rate in the adult social care sector in Coventry, the West Midlands and England were 8.6%, 5.8% and 6.8% respectively. No estimate is made of vacancy rates by parliamentary constituency.

We have distributed a £162.5 million Workforce Recruitment and Retention Fund to local authorities in England to increase adult social care workforce capacity over winter. This includes £18,133,213 for West Midlands across 14 local authorities, of which £1,050,198 has been allocated to Coventry.