I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to publish and implement a Care Workers Employment Strategy, with the aim of improving the recruitment and retention of care workers; to establish an independent National Care Workers Council with responsibility for setting professional standards for care workers, for establishing a system of professional qualifications and accreditation for care workers, and for advising the Government on those matters; to require the Secretary of State to commission an independent assessment of the support available to unpaid carers, including financial support and employment rights; and for connected purposes.
All of us will have had experience of the importance of care, whether we have had to care for a loved one ourselves or whether outside care has been provided to a relative or friend. I am sure that colleagues on both sides of the House will agree that caring is not only a skilled job but one in which compassion, respect, friendship and companionship are also hugely important. Before I dive into the detail of the Bill, I want to provide a small example of how important those elements can be.
Recently I was speaking to residents in North Shropshire and I came to a bungalow whose door was answered by a care worker. She explained that the lady who lived there was having her lunch but that she would help her to fill in my survey about local issues. A few minutes later I turned to see the care worker running up the street after me. “Joan would love to see you herself,” she said. I gladly went back to talk to Joan, who did not get many visitors and was grateful for the interaction. There was no need for that care worker to have literally gone the extra mile when she was doubtless under time pressure to get to the next resident, but it made all the difference to Joan’s day. Care is hugely important to the most vulnerable individuals in our society, yet there is consensus that the care sector is in need of urgent attention.
The Government have promised to sort out social care on numerous occasions, but we have seen little in the way of a coherent strategy to tackle the multiple issues faced by the sector. At the top of the list of issues is the workforce shortage. In only the last few years, the number of vacancies has skyrocketed to 165,000. Not only is this a vast number but the situation is getting worse. More than one in 10 posts are now empty, with the vacancy rate having risen from 7% to 10.7% between 2021 and 2022. Furthermore, the Health and Social Care Committee anticipates that a further 490,000 care workers will be needed by the early part of the next decade. To make matters worse, the Care Quality Commission has reported that over 87% of care providers responding to its latest “State of Care” report in 2022 said that they were experiencing recruitment challenges.
This workforce shortage is one of the factors driving the crisis engulfing A&E departments and ambulance services. The inability of hospitals to discharge patients into care, whether at home or in a care home, is preventing the critically ill from being admitted to hospital or handed over from their ambulance, with truly disastrous consequences for those in immediate and urgent need. But the Government have still not brought forward their NHS workforce plan and there is little chance that it will include details for the care workforce, despite the sector being critical to the healthy functioning of the NHS. On three occasions during the passage of the Health and Care Act 2022 the Government voted against amendments that would have required the Secretary of State to publish independently verified assessments of current and future workforce numbers every two years. They have not even engaged with the scale of the problem.