"We all want to live in the place we call home, with the
people and things we love, in communities where we look out for
one another, doing what matters to us.”
Social Care Future
A House of Lords report published today (Thursday 8 December)
warns that the continued invisibility of the adult social care
sector as a whole is increasingly damaging to both those who draw
on care and who provide unpaid care at a time of increasing need,
rising costs and a shrinking workforce.
After hearing from a range of witnesses, including disabled
adults and older people, carers, service providers, local
authorities, and academics, the Adult Social Care Committee’s
report, A “gloriously ordinary life”: Spotlight on adult
social care, sets out a new approach to adult social care
which calls on the Government to commit to a more positive and
resilient approach to adult social care based on greater
visibility for the whole sector, as well as greater choice and
control for disabled adults and older people and a better deal
for unpaid carers.
To achieve this means that the Government must:
1. Make adult social care a national imperative
by:
- delivering realistic, predictable and long-term funding;
- delivering a properly resourced plan for supporting a highly
valued workforce, building skills and remedying low pay;
- establishing a powerful Commissioner for Care and Support to
strengthen the voice and identity of the sector;
- finally and fully implementing the principles of the Care Act
2014, rooted in wellbeing, choice, and control;
- ensuring that the voice of social care is loud and clear
within Integrated Care Systems.
2. Prepare for the future by:
- recognising that more people will be ageing without children;
- investing in better knowledge and data to inform better
policy.
3. Ensure people who draw on social care have the same
choice and control over their lives as everybody else
by:
- enabling disabled people and older adults a genuine choice as
to who supports them and access direct payments more easily;
- providing accessible housing and assistive technology to
achieve independent living;
- working with social care staff to promote the skills to
co-produce care;
- enabling people to determine who supports them, and what
relationship they want with their family and friend.
4. Caring for unpaid carers by providing:
- easier access to, and an increase in Carer’s Allowance;
- more flexible support for carers who work, including the
implementation of Carer’s Leave;
- more support from health and social care professionals to
identify them, signpost support, and ensure that they get it.
, Committee Chair,
said:
“In this report we have revealed the impact that the invisibility
of the adult social care sector as a whole has on the way we
perceive and provide for adult social care. Our recommendations
are intended to bring those who draw on and provide unpaid care
into the daylight and that starts with changing the perceptions
around care, providing the realistic financial and workforce
strategies that are long overdue, and planning for a system
responsive to present needs and resilient for the future.
All that will help the unpaid carer now so often at risk
of poverty and ill health with a better future. But we want
a better present for them too – and our specific recommendations
for their support will deliver that.”
