The Bishop of Oxford spoke in a debate on social care on 14th October 2021, raising issues of the need for community care and the risks posed by high vacancies in the care sector:
The Lord Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, it is an honour to contribute to this key debate. Like others, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, for her excellent introduction. I welcome the Minister to his new responsibilities. It is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay.
One of the key texts on which so much of our human civilisation is based contains these lines:
“Honour your father and mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”
The care offered by one generation to another is fundamental to human flourishing and a good society. As we have heard, that care is offered in families generously and unstintingly, but it needs to be supported by the wider community, through creative partnerships with the third sector, and by the state. These principles have led to our current system of social care, which now stands in urgent need of fresh vision and reform.
Honour is critical to both the fifth commandment and the social care system. Our vision and aspiration need to rest on giving honour and dignity to each person—regardless of age, illness or disability—and to all those who offer care, whether volunteers or paid workers. Social care is under strain and goes badly wrong when we lose this concept of the dignity of those who need and offer care.
As has been said, the initiatives taken by the Government in September and the increases in funding are modest. Caveats have been articulated, including by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle in Monday’s debate. Much more is needed. As has been said, the NAO called in March 2021 for nothing less than a
“cross-government, long-term, funded vision for care.”
I hope that this could build on a foundation of human dignity and honour, with a proper emphasis on prevention and equality. The same report calls for a workforce strategy, which, as others have argued, is urgently needed and needs to be built on the same foundation.
In the coming years, the world will face a fundamental revolution in the nature of work, with a massive increase in automation in many industries. The social care sector can benefit from the fourth industrial revolution in many ways, particularly in better systems and the use of data. It is the Government’s responsibility to offer leadership and frameworks for this. However, person-to-person care can never be delegated to machines or systems. Such delegation diminishes dignity and honour. When members of my family have needed social care, the real gift has not been the practical support, vital though that it is, but the caring touch, warm smile, sharp humour and repartee that restores the dignity of the person, even in extremes of suffering. To give this honour and dignity to others, those who work in social care and offer care voluntarily themselves need dignity, recognition and honour.
Increasing that sense of honour demands practical actions that neither public applause nor rhetorical promises alone can fully fulfil. Over the past year, on average, more than 100,000 care sector vacancies have been advertised every day. As has been said, the vacancy rate today is higher than it was before the pandemic. In the coming years, the Government will have an opportunity to develop a new social contract for social care, framed by dignity and which invests in the social caring professions in terms of standards, training, recruitment, pay and conditions. This sector will need to expand, even as jobs are lost to automation in other sectors, and will be a growing part of our economy. That social contract will need to embrace better support for voluntary carers and deeper co-ordination between the NHS and local government, as has been said.
I ask the Minister to comment in his answer to the debate on the values that will need to shape the long-term vision for social care and the place of human dignity and honour within them.
Extracts from the speeches that followed:
Baroness Brinton (LD): I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, on securing this vital and timely debate today. As she said, it is a repeated debate and, frankly, it will continue to need to be repeated until the Government tackle the issues raised in it. Her speech cogently set out both the long-standing problems and the current emergencies that are tipping the social care sector into real crisis, with our extremely vulnerable citizens now finding that it is harder to get social care support and, even more worryingly, vacant beds in homes along with homes closing meaning that some geographic areas face a real crisis.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford spoke movingly of the role of families in supporting their loved ones, and the dignity that this gives to both the person receiving the care and their carers. We on these Benches agree. People should be encouraged to stay in their homes and with their families for as long as is practicable.
Lord Kamall (Con, Department of Health & Social Care): I thank the noble Baroness for summing up the numbers that we should all be aware of: 9 million unpaid carers before Covid, 4.5 million new carers, totalling 13.5 million—including 2.5 million who are holding down jobs. I also thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford for his quote from one of the 10 commandments. I am sure he will agree that people of many other faiths and no faith also agree very strongly with the importance of parents and looking after our loved ones as they get older.
Many have said that it has been a real challenge, and we agree. As the Prime Minister said,
“we are … committed to learning lessons”—[Official Report, Commons, 12/5/21; col. 138.]
from the pandemic. When the pandemic hit, the Government worked hard to ensure that the sector got the support it needed as quickly as possible. The Government published guidance tailored to care homes and care providers, domiciliary care, unpaid workers and local authorities on how to continue to safely provide care during the Covid-19 outbreak. We rolled out regular testing for the sector and have sent more than 42 million PCR swab test kits and 117 million lateral flow devices to care homes to date. We set up a massive PPE supply chain from scratch and, through the PPE portal, have provided over 3.6 billion items of free PPE for providers’ Covid-19 needs, and, since April 2020, more than 478 million items through local resilience forums and local authorities.
The Government also moved as quickly as possible to provide financial support to the sector, making available almost £2.4 billion in specific funding for adult social care throughout the pandemic. This is in addition to over £6 billion that has been made available to local authorities to address pressures on their services. Many noble Lords spoke about the importance of local authority funding.
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