Caring is a skilled job and should be paid appropriately - Helen Morgan

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.

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 has 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 per cent to 10.7 per cent 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 per cent 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 has 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.

A care workers employment strategy should be the top priority of the Government—and not just any strategy but a workable one that is fit for the future and can be appropriately adapted as circumstances change, not just press-released and shelved with little impact.

That means it has to identify where and why shortages exist as well as the areas of greatest need, and how to resolve those shortages. It needs to identify the causes of poor retention and slow recruitment, and it needs to be brave enough to tackle the importance of pay in a sector that is currently fishing in the same pool as retail and hospitality for new recruits. Caring is a skilled job and it should be paid appropriately.

That is why the Liberal Democrats have suggested the introduction of a carers’ minimum wage. By increasing the minimum wage by £2 for care workers and introducing a care workers employment strategy, we can take a bold and realistic step to deal with the chronic staffing shortages that we face.

My Carers and Care Workers Bill goes on to recommend the implementation of an independent national care workers council, free from political interference, which would establish not only minimum professional standards of care throughout the country but a system for the professional qualification and accreditation of care workers.

This would provide public recognition of the importance of the care worker’s role and provide career development as skill and experience increases. I hope that by advising on minimum professional standards and the training needed to achieve them, such a council would provide the leadership needed to improve the varying standards of care we see across the country.

Minimum professional standards would help to alleviate the time pressures on carers. It would also reduce the burnout and frustration that care workers must feel when they are forced to rush through their work faster than they would like.

An abridged version of a speech delivered by Helen Morgan, Liberal Democrat MP for North Shropshire, during the reading of the Carers and Care Workers bill.