Health and Social Care Update

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Walney. Another part of my many and varied background is as a previous deputy leader of Westminster Council, so I realise the importance of local authorities in this role. I will not confess to being familiar with that scale of unmet need at the moment, but I thank the noble Lord for raising that issue. I will make sure I go and find out more on it and, if I may, come back with a written response.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I also welcome the Minister to his role and wish him well, because of the crisis that the NHS and social care face. In asking my question, I also declare my interest as a non-executive director of Chesterfield Royal Hospital’s NHS trust and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. The Conservative cabinet member for adult social care in Devon said in the last couple of weeks:

“We are … in crisis mode … It is very difficult because you can stack shelves in supermarkets and earn more money than you can in social care. We need to see national government”


respond to this urgently. If all the £500 million given to social care—assuming that this money, because it is short term, is to last for six months—was to be equally distributed between the salaries of the 1.5 million people in social care, it equates to just 31p per hour more, which would still be below the market rate for some supermarket shelf stackers. So what is going to happen to make sure that enough resources go towards dealing with the crisis in social care, so that need can be met and staff can be retained?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

We live in a time of a very competitive jobs market and such a competitive market brings challenges with it, as the noble Lord says. We need to make sure that people feel that these jobs not only are recognised as important but make sense economically for them as well. We are investing £15 million in expanding our recruitment and resourcing to attract more people into the industry. We also need to look overseas and I think many are aware of our plans to do that. It is not lost on the team over here that we need to make sure that this is an attractive job and career for people to move into.