Asked by
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to
address the reported shortage of working age disabled people’s
personal assistants, needed to enable them to work and live
independently.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health
and Social Care () (Con)
Personal assistants are invaluable in supporting people to live
independently. The Government have in place a range of measures
to support recruitment and retention, including delivering a
national recruitment campaign, providing a £462.5 million boost
for recruitment last winter and ongoing work with the Department
for Work and Pensions to promote carers in adult social care. We
are also investing £500 million to support and develop the social
care workforce, including personal assistants, to address
long-term barriers to recruitment and retention.
(Lab)
I thank the Minister for that Answer. The lack of PAs is a
serious emergency and is creating huge anxiety for the
working-age disabled, who need and have a legal right to be
economically and social active. What seems to have happened is
that the market for and availability of people who want and value
this kind of job have vanished. Welcome as they were, none of the
measures that the Minister mentioned address that emergency. For
example, one no-cost action that would help—it would not solve
the problem, but it would help—would be for PAs to be recognised
as skilled workers and be made eligible for work in the UK, since
more than 32% of them vanished as a result of Brexit. Are the
Minister and his colleagues meeting the disabled groups that are
very concerned about this matter?
(Con)
I thank the noble Baroness for raising those issues. As she will
recognise, some of them fall between DWP and the Department of
Health, so I can take the second question back to DWP on her
behalf. We recognise this issue as part of the wider social care
sector but one issue with bringing people in from overseas—as
many noble Lords will know, I am in favour of recruiting from
overseas—is that personal assistants are often employed by
individuals and, sadly, under the Home Office rules, they are not
considered sponsors. When this was raised with me yesterday, I
asked for it to be looked into in more detail and was assured
that more conversations will be going on. It is a reasonable
suggestion; we just need to have those conversations with the
relevant department.
The Lord Speaker ()
My Lords, we have a remote contribution from the noble Baroness,
Lady Campbell of Surbiton.
(CB) [V]
My Lords, I have contributed to your Lordships’ House for 15
years because I am supported by PAs. Without them, thousands of
disabled people could not work. Can the Minister explain how the
Government are honouring their commitment to support disabled
people’s UN convention rights to live independently, given the
current PA employment crisis? Does he agree that fixing social
care must include many different ways of attracting motivated
PAs? Will he meet me and disabled experts to discuss solutions to
this crisis?
(Con)
The noble Baroness makes a welcome point and clearly demonstrates
the usefulness of and real need for personal assistants; indeed,
I have met and had conversations with her and her personal
assistant. This is part of the wider issues around employing and
getting more people into social care, as well as
professionalisation. At the moment, some of the initiatives to
professionalise a service do not extend to personal assistants,
partly because of the way they are employed. When I asked why we
cannot harmonise between personal assistants and other people in
the care sector, I was told that conversations are going on. I
will have to take this back to the department and DWP to get an
answer for the noble Baroness.
The Lord Speaker ()
My Lords, we now have a virtual contribution from the noble
Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester.
(LD) [V]
My Lords, the Minister has partly replied, but can he say a bit
more about Home Office bureaucracy which is holding up the
recruitment of care workers from overseas?
(Con)
One issue that I think noble Lords across the House agree on is a
suggestion made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. If we want
to make sure that we have the right number of workers, we should
improve training over here, but there will clearly be a skills
gap in this country and therefore we need to look overseas.
Sadly, as I said earlier, under the Home Office rules at the
moment, individual employers do not count as sponsors. Officials
in the department are having conversations with DWP to look at
whether that can be rectified, or whether there is a way to find
a trusted sponsor.
(Lab)
My Lords, working-age people with disabilities are virtually
prisoners in their own homes. We are not talking about improving
skills or having conversations. When disability is supposed to be
a subject where people are treated as normal citizens who want
and can go out to work with sufficient support, we are looking
for some answers from the Government about how they can do so.
Why are the Government only having conversations, after 12 years?
(Con)
The Government have been committed to ensuring that there is
equality for disabled people, including plenty of initiatives in
other sectors—transport, building new homes and offices, and
retrofitting—but the issue of personal assistance is a
particularly difficult one in the context of social care having
been treated as a Cinderella service for years. Some of the
initiatives that we are putting in place, such as the proper
qualifications and recruitment from overseas, sadly do not yet
apply to personal assistants because of the rules. We are looking
at those barriers and hopefully will be able to tackle them.
(Con)
My Lords, I am a member of the Adult Social Care Committee in
your Lordships’ House, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady
Andrews. We are looking at the invisibility of the unpaid carer,
but it was timely that yesterday we went to Real, a charity in
Tower Hamlets. It was a humbling and educational experience in
which the difficulties and issues within the social care system
for disabled people were brought to us. The difficulty of
accessing PAs was very clear. My noble friend the Minister
highlighted the problem in one of his answers. He said that maybe
we need go to DWP or maybe we need it to be here. It needs to be
coherent. To help those people, it needs to be one person, one
Minister, one department dealing with this matter.
(Con)
My noble friend makes a very important point. I have found this
to be the case with a number of initiatives that I have been
working on in my department. Quite often, I will have a joint
meeting on an issue—with someone from BEIS, for example—and I
then realise that they have to go and talk to someone else
outside of the room. When I have been involved in such
initiatives, I have always insisted that whoever else across
government has a role or interest in them is in the room with us.
This is clearly another example of what should be happening. It
should be jointly DHSC and DWP. Rather than thinking about whose
responsibility it is, we should work together to find a common
solution.
(LD)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that if we are dealing with
this, it will need every department involved, as has already
happened? Will he also ensure that the Treasury leads, because if
you are denying that person the chance to work, you are also
denying yourself their taxation? Can he go to the heart of
government and say, “Get your act together and bring your friends
along as well”?
(Con)
The noble Lord makes an important point about who should be in
that room when we are talking about all these issues. Generally,
across government, there are a number of joint initiatives in
terms of ensuring that we hit our target of equality for disabled
people, but as other noble Lords have pointed out, this issue
falls between DWP and DHSC. I was surprised when I was briefed on
this about where it fell. It clearly must be people in the same
room.
(CB)
My Lords, it was a pleasure earlier to hear the new Health
Secretary say that this is the kind of example that she would
want to resolve—she did not use a particular one. Could the new
integrated care boards not be the trusted sponsor for such
personal assistance in each area? It would be straightforward and
simple to introduce.
(Con)
On the face of it, that sounds a very sensible suggestion, so let
me take it back to the department, and if I am still here, I will
respond.
(Non-Afl)
My Lords, I very much welcome this Question, at a time when my
family has just started experiencing the hard stuff of social
care. It is completely absent from many people’s lives because
they are stuck in hospitals and not able to leave. People who are
already in employment will be suffering exactly the same problems
and issues with personal assistance. The Minister has been in his
post for a long time, and we have all been requesting that he
listen to what many of us with long-standing experience have
said. What will he do now?
(Con)
I first pay tribute to the long-standing experience of the noble
Baroness and to the many conversations we have had on this. That
this Question has been asked will raise and highlight the issue.
It also allows me to go back to the department, kick a few desks,
as it were—without being accused of harassment or violence—and
make sure that government can look at this in a joined-up way.
