Health and Social Care

Barbara Keeley Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I will make some progress, then take more interventions.

The Care Bill will allow for comprehensive Ofsted-style ratings for hospitals and care homes, so that no one can pull the wool over the public’s eyes as to how well or badly institutions are performing. The Bill will make it a criminal offence for any provider to supply or publish deliberately false or misleading information. We cannot legislate for compassion, but in a busy NHS, we can ensure that no institution is recognised as successful unless it places the needs of patients at the heart of what it does. The Care Bill will be a vital step forward in making that happen. That compassion should extend not just to patients, but to carers. The Bill will put carers’ rights on a par with the people for whom they care. They will have a right to a care assessment of their own and new rights to support from their local authority.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

Is the Secretary of State as disturbed as I am that the Bill puts young carers backwards a step? Adult carers’ rights might be taking a step forward, but young carers’ rights are not. We must address that during the passage of the Bill.

[Mr Hunt]

We are not putting young carers backwards. We very much recognise their needs—and a children’s Bill will address their concerns in a way that I hope will put the hon. Lady’s mind at rest.

The second issue that we need to address for the NHS going forward is joined-up care. It is shocking that, in today’s NHS, out-of-hours GP services are unable to access people’s medical records; that paramedics and ambulances answer a 999 call without knowing the medical history of the person whom they are attending; and that A and Es are forced to treat patients with advanced dementia, who are often unable to speak, without knowing a thing about their medical history.

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[Andy Burnham]

I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will come on to that, but I have a job to do in holding this shambles to account and that is exactly what I am doing.

Under this Government, people are paying more out of mum or dad’s bank account for care, which often does not come up to the standards that they want, because their council has been cut to the bone. What are they meant to make of a promised, far-off cap of £72,000, or £144,000 for a couple? The Government are giving a little with one hand, while with the other they are grabbing a fortune from people’s bank accounts.

[Barbara Keeley]

Does my right hon. Friend acknowledge that this is not even a question of £72,000 or £144,000, because those caps will be metered at the level that the council would pay, and will take no account of top-ups or accommodation costs? I have seen examples that show that people might have to pay £250,000 before they get anywhere near the cap and any help from the state.

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The cap is a mirage, and this will not feel like progress to people who are paying care charges. Indeed, it is a cruel con trick. The Government are loading extra charges on people while telling them that they might benefit from a cap in a number of years. This simply means that more people will be paying right up to the level of that £72,000 cap.

How can it be fair to pay for the cap by raiding council support? That does not make sense. Those of us who were involved in the cross-party talks—the failed cross-party talks, I might add—will remember that a question was put directly to Andrew Dilnot. He was asked whether, if there was not enough money around, it would be better to pay for a cap or to pay to support councils to ensure that the baseline was not cut further. His clear answer was that we had to do both. He said that it would not make sense to do one without the other, yet that is what this Government are doing—

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[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

I welcome the fact that we have a Care Bill to debate. I pay tribute to the hard work of colleagues on the Joint Committee on the draft Care and Support Bill. I also welcome the fact that the Government have taken on board a number of the Committee’s recommendations. However, some have not been adopted. I want to speak about the areas where the Bill could be improved and strengthened: the identification of carers and, as the right hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow) mentioned, the clauses relating to young carers.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree with the National Young Carers Coalition, which has written to all Members pointing out that the Bill does not do enough for young carers and needs to be amended so that there is a greater responsibility for identifying young carers? Does she agree that the Government should have taken heed of her excellent private Member’s Bill and incorporated it into the draft Bill?

[Barbara Keeley]

I am absolutely bound to agree with that point, and I will come on to it shortly.

As has been said, we cannot separate the funding of social care from the law on social care. We need to take on board the fact that the Bill will not help those who are struggling without the social care support they need, either today or in the months and years ahead.

The Bill builds on the recommendations of the Law Commission’s review on social care and carers, but we should remember that until the Care Bill, carers had been given rights only through measures in private Members’ Bills: the Carers (Recognition and Services) Act 1995, the Carers and Disabled Children Act 2000 and the Carers (Equal Opportunities) Act 2004. We should pay tribute to the late Malcolm Wicks, Tom Pendry and my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Dr Francis) for their work on that early legislation to give rights to carers.

When I came to Parliament in 2005, I raised the issue for the first time that GPs and other health professionals needed to identify carers within their practice population. GPs are best placed to help carers at the start of caring, which is when they need that help and advice. It is the GP who deals with the patient with dementia, the patient recovering after a stroke, or the patient with cancer. The GP and primary health care team are, after those life-changing events, well placed to see if there is an unpaid family carer. It is then a simple step for them and their teams to take time to check the health of the carer and to refer them to sources of advice and support. Caring can have a serious impact on the health of carers. In a recent survey of 3,000 carers, Carers UK found that 84% said that caring was having a negative impact on their own health—up from 74% in 2011-12.

I have introduced three private Members’ Bills on the identification of carers, and in September I introduced the Social Care (Local Sufficiency) and Identification of Carers Bill. The Bill had good support in the House. My hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) and 11 MPs from across most parties were supporters. We also had support from 27 national charities, the National Union of Students, the business group Employers for Carers and 2,000 individual carers. However, the Government did not support the Bill. In the debate, the Minister of State, Department of Health, who is responsible for care services, stressed that it was best to get everything codified in one place so that one piece of legislation addressed all issues of care and support. However, the Care Bill does not help with the identification of carers; it puts the duty of assessment on to local authorities. It is questionable whether cash-strapped local authorities will be able to assess the needs of large numbers of carers in any way that makes it a worthwhile exercise for those carers. If the Minister wants to look at the Joint Committee’s web forum on the draft Care and Support Bill, he will see that many of those who commented said that local authority assessments are of little practical help in their caring role.

[Mrs Moon]

Last week, I had a telephone call from a young man who is caring for his father. His father has the same condition as my husband, and he contacted me because of the debate we had on dementia. He told me that he had phoned his social services department twice and the psychiatric nurse twice to ask for help and support. He did not know where to turn. Is this not increasingly the problem? There is just no money: no money to provide the assessments and no money to provide the care if those assessments are carried out.

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[Barbara Keeley]

I agree with my hon. Friend: it is about carers knowing where to go for that help and support when they are so desperate.

In contrast to assessments, projects that work within primary care to help identify carers are producing outcomes that are genuinely helpful to carers. I spoke at an event last Friday organised by Salford carers centres for staff from those teams. The staff will help to identify carers and refer them to help and support. They will have a list of agencies and know where to go.

[Paul Burstow]

The hon. Lady is making important points about carers—an issue on which she has campaigned consistently. Would she join me in welcoming the announcement from the Royal College of General Practitioners over the weekend about the priority it wants attached to carers and the guidance it is now issuing to GPs to ensure that they do more? One in 10 of a typical practice’s patients are carers, so they could do a great deal more by identifying them.

[Barbara Keeley]

Very much so, but the difficulty is that GPs do not have to do it. It is good that some of them are, but they do not have to. We have a duty of assessment, which is an excellent thing, but we also have GPs who might not be doing it.

One important group of carers in great need of being identified is young carers. As we have heard, young carers are in a unique position, being directly impacted on by the health and independence of adults. The care provided to that adult should help to sustain the whole family and reduce the impact of any caring requirements on the child. We know that if care services ensured that all adults needing care received it, that would help the children in the family, but frequently, we must admit, they do not get it, and the person needing care then starts to rely on the child providing it, which impacts on the child’s well-being.

That is where improved identification and support for young carers is valuable, because it can prevent negative and harmful outcomes for those children and reduce the cost of expensive crisis intervention. We spent much time on this in the Joint Committee, and the Care Bill now provides a unique opportunity to ensure that young carers have equal rights. We shared the concern of our witnesses that it appeared that clauses in the draft Bill applied only to adult carers, leaving young carers with lesser rights. Some amendments have been made, but it has not progressed as much as it should have done, and I found it disappointing that in a recent Committee debate on the Children and Families Bill, the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), who has responsibility for children, did not accept the amendments on young carers put forward on a cross-party basis.

My hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) made the case for the amendments very powerfully. Interestingly, the children’s Minister argued in response that the draft Care and Support Bill already allowed for the assessment of adults with care and that that could be linked to other assessments, which he thought would allow for consideration of the effects of adult support needs on the rest of the household, but that is not happening on the ground. Only 4% to 10% of referrals to young carers services are from adult social care, so that route is not working. He said he wanted more adults to be given the support they needed in order to protect children from excessive caring, which is a fine sentiment, but the reality for young carers is that life is getting harder as adult care services fall away.

[Norman Lamb]

I look forward to visiting the hon. Lady in her constituency on Thursday and discussing this matter further. I totally agree with her concerns about young carers, and will seek to meet the children’s Minister to discuss it further. It is really important that we get the framework right.

[Barbara Keeley]

Indeed, but a cross-party approach did not convince the children’s Minister in Committee, which is why I am stressing it today. It is very important. I welcome the Minister of State’s assurance just now, but he has given assurances before. We cannot let the opportunity presented by these two Bills pass. Younger carers and their organisations feel that the coalition Government are leaving them out of the equation. At the moment, the threshold for an assessment is higher for young carers than for adult carers. In its evidence to the Joint Committee, the Law Commission said that the inclusion of clauses on young carers was an important area of improvement for the draft Care and Support Bill. Frances Patterson QC told us that the Bill should make provision for services for young carers as well as their assessments, and that the assessments were of limited use for young carers.

The picture of provision for young carers is now very confused, and it is a priority for Parliament to sort it out. It is not good enough to have this partial recognition of young carers in the Care Bill or to have the children’s Minister rejecting cross-party amendments on provision for young carers. The Minister of State, who is responsible for care services, has said several times that he wants a single statute. If that single statute is the Care Bill, it has to deal with young carers properly. It is plainly wrong that it does not. I am grateful for his intervention, but we need to get this right. Does he still support a single statute, and if so, can we get it right for young carers?

I welcome the steps being taken in the Care Bill, but it must be strengthened and improved in the ways I have outlined, because things such as assessments are not very helpful for carers and young carers, if that is all we are offering. As was said earlier, older people face continuing increases in home care charges. The number of people receiving publicly funded care has fallen by 7%. Unmet need is soaring, which is putting pressure on carers and our acute services. We need a bold response to the crisis in care, greater investment in social care and genuine integration of health and care services.

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[Mr Leigh]

I have no idea when that will happen.

I said I wanted to talk about opinion in Lincolnshire. Despite all the Government’s success in their central aim of attempting to cut the deficit—we have cut it by a third—people there undoubtedly feel that their voice is not being heard. We have to listen to that voice. If I may be forgiven for being party political for a moment, I should point out that there is absolutely no enthusiasm for the Labour party, because people have not forgotten who created the borrowing mess we are in. We heard a lot about plain packaging from the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), who led for the Opposition today, but the whole Labour party is plain packaged. We have no idea, frankly, what it will do.

[Barbara Keeley]

I cannot speak for all parts of the country, but I campaigned in the recent county elections in Lancashire and there was huge enthusiasm for the Labour party.

[Mr Leigh]

We will have to see what happens in various parts of the country.

It is said that this is a thin Queen’s Speech. As a Conservative, I do not object to a thin Queen’s Speech. I do not object to deleting unnecessary legislation either, whether on minimal alcohol pricing or plain packaging. I view all these as creatures of the nanny state, so it is good conservatism that we are not introducing them. However, if we are to have a Queen’s Speech that is, shall we say, somewhat light and has lots of room in it, that means there are various other things that we could do. One thing we do not need to do, I would have thought, is persevere with the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. I will not repeat all the arguments, but this is an area where many people in Lincolnshire feel that their opinions are being not represented.

If anybody wants to look at an excellent article on this subject, they should read Charles Moore’s in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday. There is a real problem. We are trying to deal with an economic crisis and the very first thing we will do after this Queen’s Speech debate—although it was not mentioned in it; as far as the Government are concerned, this is the Bill that dare not speak its name—is have two days on same-sex marriage. The Bill will then go to the House of Lords. There are enormous, complex issues at stake for the Church of England. I have no doubt that we are moving to a world in which the Church of England will be allowed to conduct only religious marriages, but will not be able to complete them. They will have to be completed by the state because of equality legislation. These are serious issues. The Government could easily mend fences with many of their supporters by putting the Bill out to further consultation.

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[Norman Lamb]

What I would say to the shadow Minister is that since 2010, 1 million extra people have visited A and E. These are real pressures and we all have to think about how we manage them. Surely the way to do that is to try to improve people’s care so that they avoid ending up there in the first place. Tomorrow I will announce a decisive shift towards integrated care, which will be part of a major strategy for vulnerable older people, whom the Secretary of State talked about earlier. We have to focus on preventing people’s health from deteriorating, stopping the crises that end up with people in A and E despite the system’s best efforts.

Several hon. Members referred to pressures in social care, including the hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward). The Government have done what they can. We have put £7.2 billion extra into social care and local government to support the system through these difficult times because of the local government settlement, but we all know that things have to be done differently. The Care Bill is totally consistent with that approach: it focuses on prevention, co-operation, integration of care and spending money more effectively to improve care for patients. I was pleased that the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) welcomed the Bill, as did the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen) and many others. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow) for his work as Minister and subsequently as Chair of the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee. He has done a lot of brilliant work to highlight the issues that the Bill deals with.

It is hard to exaggerate just how badly the Care Bill is needed. Previous legislation is now hopelessly outdated and almost irrelevant to the needs of today’s society. Tinkering around the edges was keeping the system afloat, but no more than that. The shadow Secretary of State was dismissive of the value of the Bill, but it will be a big social reform—one of which this coalition Government should be proud. The new Care Bill will reform an antiquated, paternalistic system, improve people’s experience of care and establish both health education England and the health research authority as non-departmental, stable, independent public bodies. The Bill will pool together threads from more than a dozen Acts into a single, modern framework for care and support, but it is far more than a mere compilation. The Bill will fundamentally reform how the system works, prioritising people’s well-being, needs and goals, so that they no longer feel they are battling against the system to get good care.

[Barbara Keeley]

The Minister is back on his point about the Bill creating a single statute, but it will not do that for young carers, who will be left with the protection only of the private Member’s Bills I mentioned earlier. It is not good enough for young carers to face a higher threshold than other carers before their needs are assessed. That has to be looked at. The children’s Minister has let the House down on this issue; I hope that this Minister will not do that.

[Norman Lamb]

I was coming on to pay tribute to the hon. Lady for the work she has done. I absolutely agree with her that we need to get this right. We have the juxtaposition of two Bills, dealing with children on the one hand and adult social care on the other. Earlier I made a commitment to meet the children’s Minister; I had an opportunity to speak to him briefly when he was in the Chamber earlier. I am also meeting the hon. Lady later this week. I am committed to doing everything I can to get this right, and to ensure that young carers are not let down.

The Care Bill also highlights the importance of preventing and reducing ill health and of putting people in control of their care and support. This will involve the right to personal budgets, taken as a direct payment if the individual wants it, and putting people in charge of their care and of how the money is spent. This will put carers on a par with those for whom they care for the first time. The hon. Lady has consistently argued her case, and I am determined that we should get this provision right. The hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) also made some powerful points on the subject.

The Bill will also end the postcode lottery in eligibility for care support. My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), the hon. Member for Easington and others raised concerns about the level of the eligibility. That question will obviously have to wait until the spending review, but I point out that if we were to set it at moderate need, the cost attached would be about £1.2 billion. All hon. Members need to recognise that this is difficult, given the tough situation with public finances. We also need to do longer-term work on developing a more sophisticated way of assessing need and providing support before people reach crisis point.

The Bill will refocus attention on people rather than on services. It will bring in new measures based on the Francis inquiry, ushering in a new ratings system for hospitals and care homes, so that people will be able to judge standards for themselves. The hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) criticised the idea of appointing a chief inspector of hospitals, but I disagree with her. It will be really important to identify where poor care exists and to expose it so that improvements can be demanded without fear or favour. The chief inspector will be able to do just that. It will also be really important to celebrate great care, so that those people in the health and care system who are doing everything right can be applauded and recognised for the work they are doing.