When Britain’s care homes reward shareholders over staff, we need a new system
Our care system should be enabling people to live fulfilling lives, but each week brings new evidence that Britain’s social care system is unable to deliver this.
Huge numbers of people are struggling to access support. The majority of people who deal with care services are unsatisfied with them. And the number of vacant posts in adult social care is the highest since records began in 2012-13, with about 165,000 vacancies in England on any given day.
Many had hoped that the pandemic would become a positive turning point for care, as its importance was more widely recognised and government boosted funding. What went wrong?
New research sheds light on how much extra money went into care homes during the pandemic, and how it was spent. The government scrambled to pump money into the sector, but to a large extent, staff often kept the services going at a cost to their own wellbeing and without extra financial reward. The research also reveals that workers fared differently in for-profit care companies compared with not-for-profit organisations. These insights hold important lessons for the future of care.
Care homes for older people in the UK received extra public support worth £2.1bn in the first year of the pandemic – about £5,900 for every individual care home place. Services needed support to help cover the huge costs of Covid-19. They received free PPE, money to cover sick pay for staff required to isolate, and subsidies for empty rooms as residents died and new admissions were suspended during outbreaks.
This emergency funding did succeed in propping up care home revenues in the early phase of the pandemic. Remarkably, revenues actually rose in the majority of homes in the first year of Covid, even though the sector was
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