The government’s social care strategy looks increasingly at odds with its commitment to ‘level up’ poorer areas of the country.
As the Mirror reported last week, compulsory vaccinations for social care workers - which comes into action on Thursday – will create 60,000 vacancies in an already-decimated workforce.
People who work in the care sector are terrified that this will push the system to breaking point. Staff shortages have been going on for years, but in the last few months, things have got so much worse. My charity, Access Social Care, has heard of care homes losing five support workers per week, and social providers using precious cash reserves to increase wages so they can compete with supermarkets in recruiting staff.
Some parts of the country are more at risk. We know from government data that people in the most deprived areas are three times more likely to be reluctant to take the vaccine than those in the least deprived. We can safely predict that these areas - which usually have the highest demand for care - will see more care staff switching to different jobs.
Unfortunately, there’s a pattern here.
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When the Prime Minister’s long-awaited plan for social care was announced in August, there were fears that the reforms looked designed to protect the wealthy. The Department of Health’s own modelling, which was leaked to the media, confirmed it. The most prosperous areas of the country will benefit disproportionately from the new cap on care costs.
And then, if that wasn’t bad enough, the Spending Review announced two weeks ago made clear that social care will continue to be underfunded.
Rishi Sunak promised £4.8bn for local government, but struggling councils will need to spend on a myriad of other services too. Even if social care were to get all of it, the sector would only have around 60 per cent of what it needs to meet future demand and make care easier to access. Well-deserved pay increases would need more still. The new money may prevent social care from completely collapsing, but it won’t go much further.
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Inevitably, this means council tax will be hiked up so that local authorities can fill the gap. As Access Social Care research shows, relying on council tax to pay for social care has been a big mistake of the austerity years, as the poorest councils have the least ability to raise money from their constituents.
Because of this, there’s many more people going without basic care in the least well-off parts of the country, including areas of Greater Manchester and Tyneside, than in the richer South.
This government is repeating the errors of these previous administrations – the ones that it was elected to fix. Almost every week, new social care measures are announced which will deepen regional inequalities.
How are we supposed to have faith in ‘levelling up’ when the government’s flagship policy so starkly contradicts it?
The term ‘levelling up’ is increasingly seen as an empty slogan, even by Tory MPs. In fact, if the social care sector is anything to go by, this country seems well on the way to levelling down.
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