That this House takes note of the Report from the Adult Social Care Committee A “gloriously ordinary life’’: spotlight on adult social care (HL Paper 99)
My Lords, it is almost a year since the Adult Social Care Select Committee published its report. It is five months since we had the Government’s response. Although this debate has been delayed, there is no bad time to debate adult social care—it is always timely and always urgent. I am extremely grateful tonight that so many Members of this House have stayed for a late debate to share our report and to listen to the Government. I know that members of the committee particularly appreciate the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Polak, after his highly emotional intervention in the previous Statement.
Many members of our committee could not be here, for very different reasons. I am very grateful to all of them—particularly to those who are here. We will feel the absence of the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton—not only because she is exceptional at what she does, and how she does it, but because she made an extraordinary contribution to our committee. I am also grateful that there are people who were not even on the committee here tonight who want to address the report. It was a great privilege to chair the committee and to have the task of asking the questions we did.
The two great transformational changes of our age are an ageing society and climate change—and they are interrelated. We have known about both for decades. They are both in the “too difficult” box, which is why it has taken so long to organise the courage to address the issues. We are trying to catch up.
In our report, we ask two questions which we thought had been particularly neglected. Why is adult social care so invisible compared to the NHS? What would make a real difference to the poverty and ill health that come all too often to the 1.5 million unpaid carers who do care work for more than 50 hours per week or the 4.5 million carers who are conscious that their own health is suffering?
There were a few differences of emphasis in the committee, but we were of a mind, and we were helped enormously by an outstanding group of officials from the House: Abdullah Ahmad, Daphné Leprince-Ringuet, Alasdair Love and Megan Jones. They shared with us a sense that this committee would do things differently and address these difficult questions and give more justice to them. In that spirit, we put a high emphasis on co-production and our experts by experience—not just our superb special advisers, Jon Glasby and Anna Severwright, but our expert witnesses who have tested our conclusions and stayed alongside us this year while we have debated this report and who will be watching this evening. We put an equal emphasis on empowering those who care and those who are cared for—whether caring for young disabled adults or elderly and chronically sick relatives.
Our recommendations inevitably prioritise the need for clearer pathways through the maze of information that people are offered, putting emphasis on them having a greater say in what they are able to access and use, and on their contribution as well as the labour of love that is caring. We put huge emphasis also on partnership with the Archbishops’ Commission. We shared our witnesses, evidence and conclusions—which often overlapped, because they were rooted in the same values.
My Lords, I was privileged to sit on the Adult Social Care Committee, which was so ably and sensitively chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews. I thank her for her comprehensive introduction to the debate.
I found it incredibly hard to think of what to say; it has all been said many times. We know what needs to be done. I pay tribute to my noble friend the Minister for his work and perseverance in this area, because I know that he knows what needs to be done and that he understands this sector, but we do not seem to be moving the dial one iota for people.
I travelled down from Scotland this morning, and our experience of attempts to create a national care service is not one I wish to recommend to the House. So far, its development has cost £1.26 million in engagement, £1.38 million in staff costs, an accountability agreement with local authorities and the NHS and an inadequate skeleton Bill that has been delayed three times. As Scotland illustrates, the top-down approach does not work. It is expensive and futile and, despite all the time and money spent on it, not one person’s care in Scotland has been improved.
For me, the Government’s People at the Heart of Care is based on very sound conservative principles, but we will not enable people to have choice and control unless plans are backed up by funding and action. Our committee’s report illustrates how carers, paid and unpaid, are key to ensuring that those who draw on care can indeed lead a “gloriously ordinary life”.
We heard of the huge challenges experienced by people in being able to find good PAs. The Government acknowledged in their response to the report that personal assistants are “invaluable”, yet this crucial and apparently valued workforce is unregulated, too often paid only the minimum wage, on zero-hours contracts and not funded enough to be employed full-time, and has no access to ongoing training and no recognised qualifications.
My Lords, as a member of the Adult Social Care Committee, I welcome this debate on our report and add my praise to the chair of the committee, my noble friend Lady Andrews, for her wisdom and guidance throughout. I also refer to my interests in the register.
Time is short, so I will limit my contribution to just a couple of our key recommendations. But I start by quoting the very beginning of our report, which posed the question:
“Why should we care about adult social care?”
The blunt answer is that
“it concerns all of us”.
In our lives we are likely to need that support, or to care about someone who does. It
“affects the lives of over 10 million adults of all ages in England at any one time”.
In recent years, driven by the consequence of an ageing society and the cost of residential care, together with the challenges of funding and staffing, the increasing demands on adult social care have rightly forced it up the political agenda. Tragically, though, despite a raft of reports, research papers, White Papers and legislation, very little has improved for those who depend on and provide adult social care. As we said in our report:
“Many aspects of the system remain invisible and overlooked by the public and policy makers alike”.
This is particularly true of unpaid carers, which is why we put a spotlight on them in the report—people with lived experience of the current system.
Our report said:
“We heard the frustration and anger of those who have to battle to access even the most basic support, and who have experienced adult social care becoming ever-more distanced from a service that might enable them to live a life of their choice.
My Lords, I welcome this debate and the opportunity to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and her committee for a marvellous report, which is enormously informative, and, above all, for the fact that they have highlighted the role of the unpaid carers who keep us all afloat. I have no current interest to declare, but I was for many years a trustee of a small local charity that provided sheltered accommodation and respite care, and I am going to draw on that experience in what I say.
In recent decades, we have seen massive changes in the organisation and delivery of adult social care. In 2019, the Guardian found that 86% of care home beds are now in private for-profit homes, 3% are provided by local authorities and 11% are provided by charities. Yet in every study I have seen, charities are top rated by users ahead of local authorities and for-profit provision. In large part, this is because of what one witness before the committee called the “fine-grained” knowledge of local communities. Charities are uniquely well placed to harness this and to develop opportunities to bring such a fine-grained knowledge to bear on the provision of effective care that responds to individual local needs.
However, the regulatory and funding environment militates against small, local or charitable provision. Complexity comes up time and time again in the report, and rightly so. It creates huge barriers and huge deadweight costs. I think it is worth thinking about those costs because all of what we are talking about takes place within a context of growing demand and growing pressure on care budgets, so if there are ways in which we can save money, we really need to take advantage of them. My experience was of ever-growing regulatory and bureaucratic demands which devoured time and resources and favoured the supposed economies of scale delivered by large chains. These demands also meant local authorities felt safer dealing with big centralised companies, big concerns and people who knew about the latest central diktat and spoke the regulators’ language, but this is not the language of those involved in and dependent on social care. We must tackle complexity and the centralisation that fuels it because it creates a gap between the creators of policy and writers of rules and the people involved in delivery and use. It is not easy to simplify. It takes commitment and time, but it can be done. I wish the Government’s response had acknowledged this more explicitly. Can the Minister provide any further information on whether the Government recognise the need for such a sustained effort to simplify the system?
My Lords, I start by paying tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and to all the members of the Adult Social Care Committee for the excellent report they produced last year, full of thoroughly perceptive and practical recommendations to government and speaking to the longing we all have to live a life of joy, fulfilment and purpose. The committee undertook its work in precisely the same period as the Archbishops’ Commission on Reimagining Care and it is heartening to see the considerable amount of overlap in the values proposed and the conclusions reached. Both contribute to the growing consensus that we cannot any longer tinker around the edges of the existing system. We must reset and reimagine the way that social care is understood, organised and delivered.
The committee report identifies quite correctly the importance of making social care a national imperative, yet it notes the widely held perception that social care is something that affects other people and that many begin looking for information about support available only once they have reached a crisis. The Archbishop’s Commission on Reimagining Care argued that it will be possible to reimagine social care only if we fundamentally rethink our attitudes in society, where too often we are inclined to treat people as if their value is determined by factors such as age, gender or ability rather than affirming and celebrating the dignity of all human beings, valued for who they are and not for what they do.
At best, social care is the means by which people are enabled to live a full life. This is not the responsibility of the government alone. Churches, for example, have an important part to play in supporting people to flourish in community. I think of the hugely valuable dementia cafés currently organised and hosted by church communities in my diocese, for example, in the parishes of Sprotbrough in Doncaster and Handsworth in Sheffield, which are both run in partnership with local authority well-being services.
My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the right reverend Prelate. In the same way, it was a great honour to have been a member of the Adult Social Care Committee. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and the other members of the committee who took me along with them.
It was a learning experience for me, and there are one or two points that I would like to pick up. I notice that the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, is, sadly, not in her place. The thing I learned from her is something that we do not always think about: she talked a lot about the issue of ageing without children. I thank God that I have family and that we looked after my mother, who I will come on to in a minute. It is something that you do not appreciate until you hear it. The noble Baroness is a great champion for understanding that this will affect many, many people across the country. I was glad to learn that from her.
Similarly, I was very much a supporter of the suggestion, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, that we ought to have a commissioner for care and support. Just as the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, is a champion for her issue, we need a champion who can help my noble friend the Minister and other members of the Government to focus on this. Otherwise, it gets trodden down and nobody really takes responsibility; it is too big and, in the end, nothing really happens.
I made a plea last time I spoke on this subject and I make no apologies for repeating it. Looking around the House, I say to everybody: the one thing I learned is that it is important to take politics out of social care. Let us get politics out of it and let us try to help.
In the end, for me, it was an experience that suddenly became practical. During the time that we were sitting as a committee, my mother took ill in Liverpool; she sadly passed a few months ago. What is overridingly important is to have something that we missed—we did not understand what to do as a family; I have just made a note to call it a “guide for the ignorant”. We need a guide so that, when people find themselves in a situation like this, they know what to do, who to ring, where to go, who to ask. Currently, it is a lottery.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate and I very much appreciate the work of my noble friend Lady Andrews and the committee in producing such an excellent and helpful report.
The big issue, of course, is paying for sufficient care—we have been playing with that issue for 20, 30 or more years—but, short of a grand plan, we can leave that on one side for the purposes of this debate, because, in any event, much can be done. What I would like to stress is the need to take better care of the carers. There is a paid social care service on which there are recommendations that it should be properly funded and properly staffed with appropriate status and skills, but I am very pleased that the emphasis in this debate has been on unpaid carers.
The report sets out excellent proposals and I am sure we have all been sent additional proposals from Carers UK, with an emphasis on issues such as an improved carer’s allowance related directly to the national living wage and—an issue that is extremely important to those concerned directly—some form of carer’s leave.
I want, however, to add an extra point about carers and their pensions. This arises because the unpaid carers are all too often, all too frequently, poor. They are poor because they are unable to work, or have to work limited hours, because of the care they are providing. It affects them directly during the period when they are providing care, but it also lingers on throughout their lives because they have missed opportunities for promotion and career development. The inevitable result is that they end up poor. The problem with their pensions is that, in our current pension system, you get a reasonable pension only if you have had a reasonable income while at work; because of the gap in your employment income, you have a gap in your pension.
There must be some way of improving the pensions provided for carers who have no, or limited, employment income. In one way or another, this will require providing them with credits for additional pension. My favoured approach is that they should get additional national insurance pension on top of their basic pension to make up for the gap arising from their inability to earn while providing care; so, these carers should get some additional credits for their state pension.
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Our recommendation, which was probably the most important, made it clear that adult social care is far and above being, as it is too often seen, a vital but secondary handmaiden to the National Health Service. It is so much more than that. “The NHS saved my life,” said one of our witnesses, “but social care enabled me to live that life to its best”. That is the difference, and it is why we say that adult social care must be a national imperative with stronger national infrastructure. This is the way to release its full potential, to make the best of its values and skills, realised not just in better processes but in the trusted relationships that underpin everything done in this area, and to make it possible for people who care, and people they care for, to live that “gloriously ordinary life”—the title of our report that has resonated so widely with everyone who has come across it; it is so modest, and yet it says so much.
Inevitably, there were some recommendations that were hardly new and did not need to be. I defend in particular the need to ditch short-term improvisation and plan courageously for the long term, whether through funding, a carers strategy, or a resilient and versatile workforce, or for appropriate housing to support ageing at home and not in hospital.
We have had a raft of reports this year that have all more or less made the same case, from the Local Government Association, the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, Social Care Future, and Skills for the Future. Many of them ask for the Government simply to recognise the scale and urgency of the issue of the false economy that has followed from a decade of austerity and massive cuts to local authorities—the lost hours of caring, the higher cost of caring, the endless waiting lists, the exhausted carers, paid and unpaid, the profound inefficiencies in the system, and the lost opportunities that have marked this decade.
Because the people who know so much agree on so much, our report has resonated widely, and the Government will not be surprised that their response to our report has met with dismay. In November 2022, the Prime Minister announced an indefinite delay to capping care costs. The director of Silver Voices saw this as the “final betrayal” of older people. In April, the “next steps” proposals, published during the recess, were met with a genuine sense of dismay because this was a plan for only two years, not for the future. The workforce budget of £500 million had been cut in half. Many of the bolder ideas in the White Paper have been lost in transition. When the NHS workforce plan was eventually published there was not a word about social care, without which, as the King’s Fund points out, none of the ambition, which is great and serious, can be realised.
Therefore, we were not that optimistic about the Government’s response. There was much that we could welcome. For example, the Government acknowledged the central importance of the adult social care sector—how could they do otherwise? They said that they would support the Carer’s Leave Bill, at long last. We also welcomed specific commitments, for example to ensure better data collection, more and better R&D, and more investment in innovation across the sector, but that was the least we could expect, and it should have been in place at least a decade ago. The fact is that the lack of data has reinforced invisibility. It has made it so much more difficult to plan for the right, consistent, scalable and deliverable policies on a day-to-day basis, not just today but in the future. As we report, the expectation is that the family will go on caring, but by 2030 1 million people in this country will have no families to care for them.
That is why we sought to change the lens and interrogate the future, recognising that the demography and expectations of 1947 have changed beyond recognition while the assumptions of who will care have not—it is nearly always still women. Although we have just started to integrate services, health, housing and social care should be planned from the beginning to work as closely as possible together if we are to make living longer not a fearful prospect but something to celebrate.
That is why we put such a strong emphasis on a commissioner for adult social care and support: to bring voice, visibility, agency and challenge to the service. That is why the Government’s response, calling for a chief nursing officer, misses the point. That is why we recommended an urgent review of the Care Act 2014, which held so much promise, only to be told that this would be delivered through the Health and Care Act. Not so: the scope and the potential of these Acts are very different. I ask the Minister to take both these recommendations away for further consideration.
We have also had no response at all to other fundamental questions that impact deeply on the day-to-day possibilities of what carers, paid and unpaid, can expect. We asked for a review of the pay and working conditions that disable the sector and make it so difficult for disabled people to employ and pay for a personal assistant. Where they are available, they do not stay because the employment bureaucracy is so chaotic and, frankly, they can get more money working in the health service or in Asda. These recommendations were rejected. Although there is some good news in the plan for a Skills for Care workforce this week, and numbers of vacancies are slightly down, we cannot build the future of adult social care on improved immigration. It is a contradiction in terms and of the Government’s policy. It is certainly not an answer to 152,000 vacancies across the sector.
What does it mean to build a valued and versatile care force? It means that you have to pay people decent, dignified and proper wages. At the moment, many carers do not even get the national living wage. Can the Minister tell me why and what this Government, in their remaining days, can do about it?
All these recommendations would have strengthened the resilience of the whole workforce, from personal assistants to paid carers, but they would really have helped the unpaid carers, who would have known that their labour of love, which as we know saves us billions of pounds a year but costs them their jobs, their incomes, and their mental and physical health, is valid and visible. So, indeed, would our recommendations for a more forceful and consistent approach from employers towards flexibility and support in the workplace, and for mandatory housing provision and standards.
However, the recommendation that would have made the most difference to unpaid carers was an increase in the carer’s allowance—a shameful £76.75 a week, which, because they have to work a minimum of 35 hours, works out at £2 an hour. We called for an increase not only in the pay available but in the flexibility around the threshold. The Government rejected that recommendation too.
In short, the Government rejected all our key recommendations relating to funding, workforce planning, accessible housing, support for personal assistants and unpaid carers. The subtext of their response was, “We are doing it all already”. We are not.
We asked at the end of our report: if not now, when? When will unpaid carers see real change? The answer came back, “Not yet; not now”, so there is more wasted time when we face record-breaking NHS waiting lists and the distress of all those elderly people who cannot go home from hospital because it is not safe for them to do so.
Our committee’s main message is that we need a new, more positive and more confident approach to adult social care to enable it to deliver those “gloriously ordinary” lives. That means that disabled young people and older people should have more say in the support they are offered, better choice, and a service that will attract people to work in it because it is well paid, progressive, has status with recognised skills, and more capacity because it is built on stronger and sustainable partnerships between paid and unpaid workers, recognises the expertise held by both, uses the full resources of the voluntary sector, has more visibility through a national champion to challenge poor practice, and shows what change looks like. That is the way to spread best practice and innovation. If we invest in the care economy, just as we should invest in childcare, we will build not just a fairer community and strong families but a foundation for a more efficient and more resilient real economy.
The Government have promised to improve career pathways and opportunities for progression within the adult social care workforce, and have identified £250 million to do this. Can the Minister give us any details on how this is to be spent? How could it help more people access PAs? I have encouraged the Minister before to look at the charity ENABLE’s PA model in Scotland, and do so again to support this.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, said, unpaid carers carry a huge burden but are largely unseen, unappreciated and ignored. The Minister will not be surprised to hear me calling yet again for improved identification. The discrepancy in the estimated number of unpaid carers of between 2.4 million and 6.5 million in our report illustrates how woeful our ability to identify this key group currently is.
In May the Government updated their road map for better data for adult social care, which recognises that while a variety of various sources capture some information on unpaid carers, they lack consistency and coverage. As I understand it, a new regular survey focused on unpaid carers is to be created. Can the Minister give us any update on these plans?
The Government’s vision that data should be collected once and shared with those who need it is one of those common-sense statements that sound really simple, but that I know will be very difficult to achieve and implement. Who will social care data be shared with? Will people needing care and their unpaid carers have access to their data? There are examples given, such as GP records being shared with home care managers and authorised social care staff, but who is classed as “authorised” in this context?
My worry is that social care provision is still far too far down the priority list. At the recent party conferences, neither the Prime Minister nor the leader of the Opposition spent any time discussing social care. Even the Minister for Social Care spoke about integrated healthcare teams and community health services, not social care. She spoke about how we continue to look at health and care through the prism of the NHS, saying:
“It often feels like the acute hospital is like the sun in the NHS solar system with everything else spinning round it. But it doesn’t have to be that way”.
She is right. I agree with her, but until we turn the telescope around and focus on enabling people to lead a gloriously ordinary life, social care will always lose out.
We also heard the testimonies of unpaid carers, the often invisible spouse, child, parent, sibling or friend who has to step up to provide care and support when the system is failing”.
These moving testimonies by individuals and the many wonderful organisations that try to help and support them were not made through bitterness but from a loving and caring perspective, simply asking for help and recognition of the dire and exhausting plight they often find themselves in currently.
It is against this background that the committee made its recommendations. I highlight just two tonight. First, the committee recognised that while a stronger, more resilient and integrated care sector is needed at the local level—and I believe the integrated care boards and systems must make this an absolute priority and drive this agenda forward—
“we also believe that some new and effective national leadership that focuses attention on adult social care is urgently needed”:
a real champion for social care. As Sir Andrew Dilnot described it to us, we need
“a single person whose job it is to think or worry about social care and do that publicly”.
The committee believed that:
“One effective way of doing so would be to establish a Commissioner for Care and Support, tasked with acting as an effective champion and upholding the rights of disabled adults and older people, as well as unpaid carers. The Commissioner would also embed more accountability and challenge in the system”.
What was the Government’s response to this recommendation? They said they believed that
“new statutory roles are not the most efficient way to promote and protect the rights of these groups. The duties covered by such a role are covered by work elsewhere in the system”.
To say that this response is disappointing would be a massive understatement. I do not believe that, for example, the excellent work of the Children’s Commissioner, if abolished, would be well covered elsewhere in the system. The Children’s Commissioner ensures an independent focus on the needs of children, and adult social care deserves the same focus. When he replies to this debate, will the Minister explain where the efficiency, transparency, accountability and, crucially, independence is clear in the current system?
Secondly, and very briefly, I will address our recommendations to review the care allowance, which the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, touched on. It currently does not reflect in any way the real value of unpaid carers. In my view, it is unacceptable that this is the lowest benefit of its kind, exacerbated by the threshold of caring hours and the low and inflexible earnings limit.
The Government’s utterly complacent response is to say:
“The government keeps the earnings limit under review and considers whether any increase in the limit is warranted and affordable”.
I believe that this is disrespectful to the millions of unpaid carers, without whom this care system would collapse and who need crucial financial support now. Their caring responsibilities often arise through an unforeseen incident or circumstance, such as a sudden diagnosis of chronic illness, a devastating accident or a stroke, so dramatically undermining household income or long-term financial and pension planning. I urge the Minister to reflect on this and respond accordingly tonight.
I also want to endorse as strongly as possible one of the report’s recommendations and its emphasis on respite care and providing breaks for unpaid carers. Recommendation 33 says:
“The Government should dedicate ring-fenced funding to increase the availability and capacity of services that provide flexible short breaks for unpaid carers”.
I very strongly agree. It may seem odd to have devoted most of the time that I have been on my feet to talking about local responsibilities and local decisions, and of course we need to make the system simpler and more local in how things are spent and in reducing regulatory complexity, but we are also, as I said, operating in a system where the pressures on budgets are gigantic. If we do not ring-fence funding this way, I fear the same thing will happen as happened in the local authority where I got my experience, which was that when our little charity closed the door respite care on a regular basis in the local authority effectively ceased. It was a chance for the local authority to reduce expenditure and walk away from something. However, this respite care and these breaks for unpaid carers are a lifeline. They are quite complex to organise and seem quite expensive, but when you take into account the direct benefits to carer well-being and their ability simply to carry on, I think we have to acknowledge that what they bring in results and rewards is enormous and that simply looking at apparent up-front costs obscures this reality. I would have been happy to have seen more recognition of this in the Government’s response.
I would like to take this opportunity once again to thank the committee and its chair for a wonderful report and to say how tremendously important it is that we remember those unpaid carers.
The primary recommendation of the Archbishops’ Commission on Reimagining Care is the development of a national care covenant which would clarify the roles and responsibilities for social care to be shared across society. The language of covenant encourages us to move away from ideas of contracts and rights towards powerful notions of partnership and interdependence. We all stand to benefit from a society where our dependence upon one another is recognised and celebrated and promotes the flourishing of all so that each one of us indeed has the best possible chance to live a “gloriously ordinary life”. Will the Minister say how far the concept of a national care covenant has been found useful by the Government in their ongoing efforts to reimagine social care?
As it happens, I am from Liverpool and the organisation there was pretty impressive. There was a STARS scheme, which the Marie Curie centre had put on, and they came in to see my mum four times a day while she needed help. Without that, I do not know what we would have done. I live here, my sister lives in London and my mum was in a flat in Liverpool.
The experiences we had throughout were horrendous. As I have said once before here in the House, we experienced the best and the worst. The worst was when a nurse was assessing my mum—who could not speak any more—to see what the next stage of care would be. The nurse was in Maidenhead, or somewhere in Kent, and she was in Liverpool, unable to speak, and they did it on Zoom. It was a relic of Covid, of course, but it was no help to my mum at all. It took weeks before they had to pass on their report, from Margate, to a panel of three people who had never met my mother, to decide what sort of care she would get. It is mad. I repeat: we need a guide for the ignorant. The Government need to provide something like this so that people know where to go.
To conclude that story, the Marie Curie hospice in Liverpool was amazing; the people there were amazing. They cared for my mum for three and half months, which is pretty unusual in a hospice. They could not have been nicer. I remember after she passed, I thanked them for everything they had done and then I said, “But where is the gold watch? She has been in a hospice for three and half months”. They were amazing and I shout out to them.
In conclusion, it was a deep honour to have been a member of the committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and I learned so much. Following the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, I ask the Minister to explain the role of data and patient records, and how we can use technology to support people to stay in their homes as long as possible.
This is very much an issue for all carers—male, female, sons, daughters, parents. They are all affected in the same way but, as most care is provided by women, it impacts far more significantly on women. Hence, the main reason for the gender pensions gap, which should get more attention, is that women provide the care. The way to solve that problem is to provide them with some pension entitlements for the period when they were providing that care.
It is not mentioned in the report but I will now be pressing this issue as often as I can. Clearly, it is relevant here: care for carers means providing them with decent pensions.