Commons Debate on Elderly Care

7.5.02

Mr. Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton):

I rise to speak because this issue is of huge concern to my constituents. They raise it with me in advice session after advice session in my tours of residential nursing homes in the royal borough, so I felt it right to attend today's debate.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) not only on his measured and well considered remarks but on the work that he has done in his constituency. I have always regarded him as one of the most impressive Labour Members, and his performance today has only confirmed that judgment. I hope that he will share some of the papers from his conference with me, so that I can see whether I can organise a similar conference in my constituency. I am currently undertaking a survey of care home owners in the royal borough, using a pack produced for me by my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Mr. Burstow), which is producing some interesting results. To follow that up with a conference may be the next step forward and, as with the hon. Member for Stafford, it may be the best service that I can provide for my constituents.

I should declare an interest: I have an elderly grandmother who is recovering in Fordingbridge convalescent hospital because she recently broke her hip for the second year running. She was about to come out of care to go back to her warden-controlled flat when she fell over in hospital and broke her left wrist. Family members, including me, are increasingly concerned about the care provision that we make for her in the future. Therefore, the experience that I bring to the debate comes not only from my constituents but from the questions that my family and I are having to ask about my grandmother.

Some basic issues arise when one begins to look at the individual families and their concerns. The first question is: where is my relative to go? Is there a place available for him or her? Because so many care homes have closed down in my constituency, the number of places available is limited. People must wait, either in hospital, like my grandmother, blocking much needed NHS beds, or at home, where the quality of care is not good enough. Neither case is satisfactory, so one of the most important questions concerns the number of places.

It is easy to see why there are so many closures in my constituency. First, the labour market is very tight. The number of qualified people available to nurse and care for the elderly in homes is increasingly limited. It is noticeable when one goes round the care homes that many of the nursing care assistants are from countries such as the Philippines, having been brought over by different agencies to fill the gap. However, that is not an easy or cheap solution, and the pressure of costs on care home owners is increasing because of the tight labour market. I welcome the tight labour market because it helps to drive down unemployment, but it has that knock-on effect, which must be addressed by other areas of Government policy.

The lack of places in my area is also driven by two other factors. First, because of rising property values in areas such as Kingston, many care home owners coming towards the end of their working lives are being offered sizeable sums by property developers. One cannot blame them for wanting a decent pension, but a number of homes are closing for that reason.

Secondly, that desire to cash in on the value of the property is being exacerbated by new regulations. We know that there has been all-party support for those regulations, and I am not undermining the thrust of them, but in an area such as Surbiton where many of the houses were built in the Victorian era, although adaptations have been made, it would be extremely costly for care home owners to make the changes necessary to meet some of the more stringent standards in 2006-07.

There is insufficient help available to make that worth owners' while, so many of them are having to say, "We can't make that room a little bit larger-it's impossible. We can't afford to knock those two rooms into one to meet the standards, either, so we'll have to sell up." The problem is huge. Kingston has some of the most severe pressures in the country on its care sector because of those problems. The borough's senior citizens are suffering as a result, and we have to tackle that quite urgently.

There are other issues that we ask about immediately after finding places for our loved ones, such as the quality of the care. As I go round the residential nursing homes in my constituency I find a high quality of care, and I have seen some very dedicated people, but the owners tell me that they have problems in finding qualified staff. The hon. Member for Stafford touched on that during his speech.

Another issue germane to myself and my constituents is that people like their relatives to be near. Often, grandmothers or grandfathers live some way away in a different authority area. They may live in a home or a warden-controlled flat, or benefit from domiciliary care. Then may come the moment when they need to go into residential care. The complexities and difficulties of moving someone from one authority to another are large. If people want their relatives to be near to them when they move to a care home, that can be extremely difficult, given the different financial regimes. Will the Minister comment on that problem?

The Government have slowly been trying to address the problems, and after a lot of pressure and campaigning by my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam they have begun to change policies. In the Budget they announced some increases of more than 6 per cent. in real terms for social services over the next three years. The question is whether that is sufficient, particularly if one subtracts from that settlement the extra cost of employers' national insurance contributions. The real-terms increase is significantly less when that extra taxation is taken into account. I am not convinced that the settlement is up to the job. I know that the Minister will not like that, but the extent of the challenge in the sector, and its high relevance to the challenge in the NHS, is such that that sector ought to be getting a better settlement than the NHS.

That sector has been the Cinderella sector, and has been underfunded for many years. The catching up that it needs to do is even greater than that required in the NHS. I found the Budget settlement in that area disappointing. The arguments that the Government rightly used to back the current funding mechanism for the NHS apply in this sector too-in spades.

The Chancellor quite rightly argued that a taxpayer-funded health service is needed because in society we should pool risk. We come together as a community and decide that that is the most effective and efficient way of funding that type of service. That argument applies just as much to the care sector-yet people are charged, the quality of service is not sufficient, and the sector has been severely underfunded for a long period. I urge the Minister to press the case for extra funding in future negotiations with her colleagues.

Because the time is approaching the witching hour for Back Benchers I will draw my remarks to a close, Mr. Deputy Speaker-save to say that I can tell the Minister and her colleagues that areas such as mine, which many Government Members believe are prosperous and do not require funding, experience pressures that are as severe as those anywhere in the country, and our budgets and council settlements have not been up to the task of meeting that huge challenge.