Care homes urgently need a National Insurance U-turn from Rachel Reeves: Andrew Vine
THE owner of a care company I know is taking time out of looking after her elderly clients tomorrow to watch the Chancellor’s statement on government spending over the coming years.
She’s hoping for more money for social care, because the crisis of a collapsing system has become the worst she’s known in 10 years of running her own business. But she expects to be disappointed.
She’s at the sharp end, providing home care in Leeds for people in their 80s and 90s, and what she sees every day keeps her awake at night.
Council cuts are making more people turn to private providers, but she and other companies can’t find new staff for a sector that already has more than 100,000 unfilled vacancies, so old people getting in touch to ask for help have to be turned down.
Even if they could recruit carers, the rise in National Insurance contributions means the sums don’t add up for a small firm, which faces paying more out in wages than it can charge in fees to clients if they are to remain affordable for retired people with limited means.
The result is increasing numbers of frail elderly people struggling to cope with the basics of looking after themselves, unable to get the help they need.
A couple of years ago, she and several other independent firms got together in a WhatsApp group to help each other, and people looking for care.
If any of the companies was contacted by a new client they could not accommodate, the request was passed around the group so somebody else could hopefully take them on.
It worked well at first, matching carers to clients. But now nobody in the group has the additional capacity for the rising numbers of people seeking care, which unsettles everybody because they know only too well that those they are having to refuse are in many cases desperate and with nowhere to turn.
The NI increase is also affecting the care homes they all talk to on a regular basis.
They have had to increase fees as a consequence which means their residents running down savings – or the proceeds of selling their homes – even faster, to the point where they have nothing left and the state will be left to pick up care costs.
This is the picture of a broken system as seen every day by people in Yorkshire doing their best for those in need, and hearing some heartbreaking stories in the process, of frightened old people suffering indignities in their twilight years.
Even among those who have managed to find help, a constant, nagging worry is wondering what will happen to them when their money runs out.
It is a daily story of desperation that feels a world away from carefully-worded government statements and talk of the need to be financially prudent.
Nobody would bet on a huge injection of cash into social care from the Chancellor tomorrow, even if there is additional investment in the NHS.
But putting more money into the health service won’t solve its problems unless the care crisis is addressed, because a constant headache for hospitals is beds being occupied by elderly patients who cannot be discharged because there is nowhere or nobody to look after them.
To the carers I talk to, it seems successive governments pay lip service to tackling the crisis without doing anything to sort out the problems that are all too apparent.
At the heart of the problem is a long-standing failure by both Labour and the Conservatives to properly integrate social care into the country’s health system, treating it as an essential nationwide service that needs to be funded and managed in tandem with the NHS.
The current government has again kicked the issue down the road with a study into care provision that will not deliver any proposals until the end of the decade, by which time the crisis is only likely to be worse.
Even when it does report, political wrangling and a probable general election in 2029 will mean we’re well into the 2030s before any comprehensive overhaul of social care becomes a reality.
It simply cannot wait that long. The human cost is not one a civilised society should be prepared to tolerate and a failure to act now is another crisis in the making, with local authorities warning they are being driven towards bankruptcy by ever-rising care costs.
Yet the Chancellor actually made matters worse with her hike in national insurance contributions for employers.
She has the chance to put that right tomorrow. There has been a government u-turn on winter fuel payments for pensioners, and another to exempt care providers from higher bills for employing people might ease at least some of the pressures on a system at risk of collapse, however embarrassing it would be for the Prime Minister.