17th September 2021
Many of you will have followed the recent media debate around the rise in National Insurance planned to increase investment in Social Care over the next 5 years.
It seems to me that this is a typical political solution driven by a clever political brain in the Department of Health, which tackles the following chestnuts of: how do we raise more money for the NHS to clear the pandemic backlog, and how do we say that we have fixed the challenge of funding for social care, which has been a problem for decades. Esssentially on the latter point, as the NHS has grown siginificantly over the last 20 years, it has come as a huge shock to families that when they need care for a loved one, it falls largely outside the NHS and is means tested by the Local Authority.
The good news about this funding, assuming that is does flow to social care in time, is that we at least can frame the envelope of funding that a family has to potentially find to pay for personal care costs for a loved one. In time the insurance market may develop helpful products to address this need. However the government help does not extend to the 'hotel' element of costs in a care home, so you may still have significant costs to address in that regard.
Whilst these reforms will raise people's expectations of a solution to social care, it is likely that this funding will not address the real crisis of access to effective social care when you need it, which lies in the shortage of workers in frontline social care.
This shortage of workforce has been an issue for the last 20 years, driven largely by the rise in our welfare state provision rather than pay rates in the sector. In Tunbridge Wells our pay rates are way above the living wage, but our traditional workforce finds to move from generous welfare provision into work just isn't worth it. The key to unlocking this lies in free or subsidised good quality childcare, but I see little progress on this important issue.
The alternative to moving our home grown workforce back into work in the sector, lies in relaxing the visa requirements for all workers in Social Care, allowing us to recruit to fill positions at the frontline. At the moment the only relaxation relates to Senior Positions.
So the key to fixing social care in our community lies in mobilising an increased social care workforce, not in throwing money at a system straining at the seams.