Having watched her younger brother struggle to receive the support he needed from the adult social care sector, Shelagh Young fears for what her children will have to go through as she gets older.
Her brother Bob Young, 61, started suffering from multiple sclerosis in his forties, and is now quadriplegic, requiring round-the-clock care.
The former tree surgeon had managed to save enough for a second property and paid for his own care at first, before finally selling the property when he ran up into debt.
The NHS now pays for his care because of the specific medical condition he has, but he would have run out of money entirely three years ago if they didn’t.
Ms Young doesn’t want her own children to go through the same problems and supports Andy Burnham’s pledge to create a social care service to fix the system.
“I would rather that they didn’t feel stressed about my social care if I need it, that I have about Bob’s. Once I’m dead, they might not think, ‘It’s a real shame we haven’t got as much inheritance, but at least we had the benefit of not worrying about mum’s social care’. [But] I know which is better,” Ms Young told The i Paper.
‘There is already a crisis’
In 2019, after his at-home care package collapsed, Ms Young found herself scrambling to get her brother the care he needed.
“There was no care home in the whole of his region that had capacity to take him on,” she said. “I was realising that everything I’d read about it being a potential crisis was probably understating the situation, there was already a crisis.”
Shelagh Young’s brother is one of many people who has at time struggled to pay for the complex care they need due to an underfunded social care systemBob, her brother, lives in rural Cornwall, where “rents are very high” and “people have got to be able to afford a decent vehicle to drive to where the person living in a rural area lives”, she added. “Staff [at the care home] were leaving, even if they really enjoyed the work, because they could earn £2 more an hour at Lidl or Aldi.”
She says any reforms would need to include a substantial wage increase to boost recruitment.
“The whole system is stitched together with goodwill,” she said. “You’re not paid enough and you’re not provided with good enough equipment to deal with everything that life throws at you.”
This comes following the new Labour Prime Minister’s announcement to create a National Care Service.
Speaking on Wednesday, Burnham said a new service must be created to fix the broken social care system. He has instructed Baroness Casey to bring forward her review by a year and focus on how a new service could be created, although he did admit his plans would require “difficult decisions”.
Death tax opponents are ‘selfish’
Ms Young thinks people who do not support a tax paid after the care recipient dies, such as Burnham suggested when he was health secretary, are blind to the failures of the system they have not had to deal with.
“I’m just really shocked that the selfishness in my generation who’s done really well out of a ridiculous system,” Young said.
You realise you can’t sustain it. It’s those people who don’t understand that because they’ve luckily avoided it, and who are saying, ‘why should I be taxed twice?’”, she said.
But money alone isn’t enough to solve social care, Ms Young says.
“If ‘free at the point of access care’ means that some form of taxation system is created, which means that carers are paid fairly for the job that they do, then yes, fantastic,” she said. “If all that does is reproduce this broken system where people are not treated well as workers, then it’s really difficult to back the system.”
‘No idea’ who would provide care if migrants leave
The agency that eventually took on Bob was staffed entirely by overseas workers. Now, about 20 per cent of the workers are British-born, Young estimates.
One of her greatest hopes for the new plans is that Burnham will reverse changes to immigration rules which make it harder for overseas care workers to get indefinite leave to remain (permanent residency), as she fears this might mean carers from overseas returning to their home countries, leaving her brother stranded.
“He and I have no idea who would provide care for him, if those people weren’t there,” she said.
Though she acknowledges there is a youth unemployment crisis, she does not think young British people are “waiting in the wings” to do this job.
“It’s the sort of job that you need someone with a bit of life experience,” she said. “It’s just insane to say that there is any sort of workforce locally, even if wages went up quite considerably, that is suddenly going to substitute for these people.”
Luke Piper, head of immigration at the Work Rights Centre said: “Migrant care workers traveled here in good faith to do some of the most low-paid yet important work there is, but rather than receiving a thank you, they’ve been betrayed by Shabana Mahmood’s plans to triple their wait for settlement.
“If these plans go ahead, many may well decide to take their labour elsewhere, to a country that treats them fairly, leaving the disabled and elderly people who depend on them in dire straits. If Andy Burnham is serious about fixing the care crisis, he must make sure migrant care workers can stay here for good, rather than throw away their contribution to appear tough on migration.”
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