The Funding of Social Care

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 2:11 pm on 6 March 2019.

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Photo of Helen Mary Jones Helen Mary Jones Plaid Cymru 2:11, 6 March 2019

I'm very grateful to you for your answer, Minister. Can you give us some indications of the timescale under which that group is expected to report? Because I'm certainly being told that we are, in some parts of Wales, facing a crisis in social care, one of the major issues being recruitment of staff. Of course, there's a Brexit element to that, but, in the context of this question today, one of the other major issues is the lack of parity of pay as well as parity of esteem between those who do identical jobs in the health service and those who do exactly the same roles in the care sector, where the work is less secure, where the terms and conditions are less favourable. And I'm constantly being told by care providers that they are training staff and then losing them to the NHS because the conditions are so much better there.

Is the working group that you've just mentioned addressing those parity of pay issues? If it isn't doing so at the moment, can I ask you to commit to doing so? Because, in the end, the quality of our care services, as of our health services, is entirely dependent on the people that provide them. Everything else you can do, but, unless you get the people right, you really can't provide the service that people need, particularly in terms of caring for the elderly. If you've got a constant turnover of staff, the effect that has on quality of care and the well-being, the emotional well-being, of individuals is devastating.

So, can I ask both for a timescale and that the working group does address those issues? We hear a lot about parity of esteem between health and care, but we say in Welsh 'diwedd y gân yw'r geiniog'—at the end of the song is the penny, and I don't think that people working in care care quite so much as about esteem as they do about what's in their pay packet.