Care funding U-turn 'is an insult to social care'

A U-turn over funding for social care will make it even harder to recruit people to a sector already in crisis, experts have warned.

Geoff Butcher, who runs six care home across the Midlands, said he was "hugely disappointed" by the government's plan to halve the £500m it had promised to plug staff shortages.

He warned the "massive" struggle to recruit care staff would now continue.

The health minister said its investment would still make a difference.

Mr Butcher, whose company Blackadder Corporation has sites in Stourbridge, Bewdley, Hereford, Malvern, the Cotswolds, and Leicester, said he needed 7-8% more staff but it was hard to attract people to the roles without adequate funding.

"The problem is getting worse in terms of finding people who want to work for national minimum wage and do both physically and emotionally challenging 12-hour shifts.

"There's a lack of people who want to do the job for £10.50 an hour and the sector is funded at that level by the local authorities, so it's virtually impossible for providers to find the money to attract people in.

"You can go and have a far more comfortable existence doing parcels for Amazon or stacking shelves at Lidl for more money. That really is, at the end of the day, the core issue."

He said the knock-on effect of not being able to recruit enough staff meant some providers would have to cut back on the services they could offer.

Joyce Pinfield, from the National Care Homes Association, has run a number of homes and lives in Worcestershire. She said holding back half the money was "another insult to social care".

"We keep being promised funding and it keeps being taken away. We have over 165,000 vacancies and well over 1.5m unmet care needs as we speak, simply because we can't get the care staff and that's a difficult situation because the pay is so low, they're not valued.

"So the announcement today that the training funding is going to be cut just shows how little value the government put on social care. Any way of being able to pay [staff] the correct wage for the job and also give career progression... just isn't being considered whatsoever.

"It will already increase a very difficult situation, because it's already well-recognised that social care is in crisis."

Ministers earlier unveiled £2bn of grants for the next two years but £600m was held back by the Department of Health and Social Care, of which £250m was originally promised last year to support the workforce through measures such as extra training places.

About one in 10 posts are vacant with staffing shortages rising by more than 50% in the past year, and there are currently more than 500,000 people waiting for care.

Health minister Helen Whately said: "This package of reforms focuses on recognising care with the status it deserves, while also focusing on the better use of technology, the power of data and digital care records, and extra funding for councils - aiming to make a care system we can be proud of."

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