Mike Padgham a residential care provider, Chair of the Independent Care Group, an organisation that represents care providers across North Yorkshire and Co-Founder of the Yorkshire and Humber Care Associations Alliance, gives his take on the ramifications of the new Government for the sector.
So, as I write this, a new dawn is breaking for politics in this country and, we hope, for adult social care.
After a bruising, bizarre and, quite frankly, frustrating General Election campaign Labour, as expected, is forming the new Government. What will that mean for this wonderful sector that we work in? Well, time will tell but we must go forward with optimism and also be pro-active.
The period of a new administration offers a very brief opportunity to influence the Government quickly. It won’t be easy. As he crossed the threshold of Number 10, Sir Keir Starmer faced multiple challenges. Conflicts and turmoil abroad and continuing economic and social crises at home.
Mr Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting will have a letter from the Independent Care Group waiting for them, appealing to them to make social care reform a high priority. It will tell them that the job of bold reform of social care has to start straight away.
In our manifesto, we called for reform that gets care to the 1.6m people who currently can’t get it and which ends the scandal of people having to sell their family home to pay for care. We asked for dementia to be treated like other serious conditions like heart disease and cancer and treatment funded through the NHS. And we called for social care staff to be paid the same as the NHS to tackle the current 152,000 staff shortage.
In its manifesto, Labour fell short of meeting those demands. It did, however, commit to a National Care Service and ‘home first’ care to keep people living independently. It also promised greater integration with NHS services and fairer pay, terms and conditions to ‘professionalise’
the workforce. Mr Streeting also committed the party to honour the scheduled cap on care costs to prevent people from having to sell their homes to pay for care.
All very laudable, if falling short of the bold, once-in-a-generation type of reform that we might have hoped for. It was in keeping with the rest of the Labour manifesto, which had prudence as its watchword throughout.
My biggest issue with Labour – aside from the extent of its reforms – was its timetable or rather the lack of it.
I concede that the level of change needed to get social care back on an even keel cannot be achieved overnight. But I was dismayed to hear Labour talk about it taking at least the first five years of the new government to get reform underway.
Respectfully, I’m not sure we have that long.
We have waited 30 years for reform and we need to start work straight away, switching resources from the NHS into social care to meet unmet demand, tackle the delayed discharges that are blocking up NHS care and properly reward the workforce.
Money invested in social care can be money saved for the NHS as it keeps people out of costly hospital beds and instead sees them cared for in their own homes or in care or nursing homes.
As we grow the sector to support the 80% of us who will need social care in our lifetimes, we will contribute more to society and to the economy.
In our letters to Mr Starmer and Mr Streeting, we have therefore identified some quick wins. The new Government could start by calling upon organisations like ours to provide first-hand suggestions of what needs to change. We would ask that they immediately reverse the Conservatives’ ban on overseas recruits bringing over their dependents, which has stifled vital recruitment. We would urge them to introduce and fund a minimum wage for social care staff, supported by ring-fenced funding for commissioners to pay for it and minimum, standardised rates for care beds and homecare hours that commissioners must pay when purchasing care. And we would look to them to raise carers’ allowance to better reward the army of unpaid carers who do such an amazing, unsung job.
That would do for starters. Not, admittedly, a 400-page strategy document filled with perfectly formed, long-term solutions that politicians like so much, but a good start and that is what we need at the moment.
@Mike_Padgham @IndCareGroup @YHumbAlliance
independentcaregroup.co.uk yorkshireandthehumbercareassociationalliance.co.uk
