If Members who are leaving the Chamber could do so quietly, we will move to the short debate and I call Gareth Davies. 

Gareth Davies, you can start the short debate. 

Diolch, Llywydd. Today I'm going to talk about social care in Wales and discuss the merits of different remedies available that can alleviate some of the challenges in what is a complex sector with many complex problems. I intend to give a minute of my time to my colleague James Evans.

I'd like to begin by acknowledging the time that tens of thousands of people across Wales give to care for others, whether social care in a professional capacity or whether unpaid support for others, including parents or children. There is a near unanimous view that social care in Wales is still in the midst of a crisis, with 100 per cent of NHS leaders surveyed agreeing with this assessment in 2022. And whilst I appreciate that many of these challenges are not unique to Wales, this debate, I hope, will shed light on some of the most challenging issues in social care. Importantly, though, this debate will give Senedd Members an opportunity to discuss solutions to some of these problems.

The Deputy Presiding Officer (David Rees) took the Chair.

Some of the issues impacting social care in Wales that I would like to touch on this afternoon are recruitment and workforce retention, and an improved relationship between NHS trusts and the social care sector. I sent Members a document with some recent figures that highlight some of the pressures on the social care sector at the moment. Workforce retention is particularly poor in the social care sector with a particularly high staff turnover. There are varying reasons for this but, chiefly, broadly low pay in the social care sector leaves carers feeling undervalued. We often see that care workers leave the profession for alternative employment that pays a very similar wage but inevitably comes with less responsibility. Many care workers are undervalued for this reason and they have to work unsociable hours with pay that is the same as for a supermarket worker. Why would someone want to remain in the care sector with the burden of responsibilities looking after another person's welfare when that isn't reflected in the social care pay, when you consider the responsibilities that they have in comparison to other low-paid sectors.

The options for career progression can also be low, with most caring roles offering no real route to progress. Fair pay that reflects the work that those in the care sector do, along with good working conditions, will go a long way to ensuring that care workers feel like they are being compensated for their labour.

A study conducted by Oxfam in 2020 showed that 68 per cent of adults in Wales think that care work is not valued highly enough by the Welsh Government. The Welsh Government has introduced a real living wage for social care workers, which we support, with an uplift to £10.90 per hour. This realistically is a bare minimum and is a wake-up call that more Government money will not fix this issue alone, but, with the right investment model, the industry would be paying a fair wage. I would like to see more investment in early education, which creates 2.5 times as many jobs as the same investment in construction and yields greater tax returns. Spend on social security benefits also decreases as it enables parents to work more hours without state assistance.

The burden on the NHS is also reduced significantly when we have a successful, functioning social care system. Currently, we are still seeing bottlenecks forming in hospital wards where patients are not being discharged when they are medically fit to be discharged, as the appropriate care cannot be procured at home. People are therefore taking up valuable bed space in hospitals, which costs the taxpayer more money and causes delays for patients who need the bed space more.

A particular avenue that I think should be explored in order to aid recruitment into the social care sector is utilising the transferrable skills possessed by unpaid care workers. By current census data, there are 310,000 unpaid care workers in Wales, and should they choose a career in the currently unattractive care sector, there is no acknowledgement of their caring responsibilities outside of a professional setting. I think that these transferrable skills should be acknowledged and honed in a professional setting with something akin to a fast-track care training scheme for those with unpaid personal caring experience.

The announcement of the draft budget by the Welsh Government did cause concern, with a predicted £646 million funding gap in social services. The Welsh Local Government Association has said that councils were facing record levels of demand in both children's and adults' services.

There are many other factors very much involved that are intertwined with the health service, such as prevention. 'A Healthier Wales' and general public awareness of healthier eating will lead to the prevention of many social care issues that could have been avoided. An overall move towards a healthier Wales will lower the rates of obesity and heart disease, and will relieve pressure on social care significantly. Figures from 2021 show that 62 per cent of people in Wales are overweight or obese, which significantly increases the likelihood of the need for obese individuals to require care, or bariatric patients, as they're referred to in healthcare settings.

To close, Deputy Presiding Officer, people who provide care and support for others, including parents, unpaid carers and the childcare and social care workforce, form an invisible network that holds society together. It is important that we recognise the importance of care work in society and the importance of the industry, and recognise the crisis first and adopt solutions to these problems. Thank you very much. 

I'd like to thank Gareth Davies for bringing this short debate to the Chamber today, because we all know the link that social care has to actually relieve the pressures on our wider health service here in Wales. We all know that there are far too many people sitting in our hospitals with delayed transfers of care between our hospitals and the care system, and it's something that I wanted to raise today, because I know that many of my constituents are actually stuck in hospitals and haven't got the care packages that they need to come back home or back into the community. So, I'd be very interested to hear from the Deputy Minister today what plans the Welsh Government have got to address those delayed transfers of care, because if we can do that, it would take so much pressure off our accident and emergency departments and, actually, get those people who are waiting outside A&E departments into them and into the care that they need in our hospitals.

I call on the Deputy Minister for Social Services to reply to the debate—Julie Morgan.

Thank you for the opportunity to reply to this debate.

I'd like to thank my colleague the Member for the Vale of Clwyd for putting forward this important subject today and, also, for stressing the importance of the care system to society as a whole. I'm deeply committed to ensuring that our most vulnerable citizens, and those who care for them, are able to lead healthy and fulfilled lives, achieving what matters to them.

As a Government, supporting our most vulnerable people is our top priority, and I am proud of our track record in prioritising investment in services that will support them. For example, we continue to protect and, indeed, increase the local government settlement, with a 3.1 per cent increase proposed for the next financial year. This includes funding within the local government revenue settlement to meet the cost of the real living wage for social care workers. Gareth acknowledged in his speech that he does support the introduction of the real living wage for social care workers, and I thank him for his recognition of how important that is.

We have shown committed leadership in protecting services for our more vulnerable groups in Wales, and this— 

Deputy Minister, will you take an intervention from Gareth?

Whereas the real living wage is supported by me and the Welsh Conservative group, it's also incumbent, I think, on us to look at other ideas across the career of a social care worker, in terms of training and feeling valued in those roles so that the pay, then, does complement a good career that can attract people into the workforce, so that they feel like it is a rewarding career and that there is career progression and glass ceiling breaking, as I've alluded to with you on many occasions.

Yes. Thank you very much. Again, I agree with that point, and, as you know, we have set up the social care fair work forum, which has produced proposals for progression within the social care field and we have actually consulted on those proposals. But that is obviously a very important point.

So, as you said, Gareth, in your contribution, the social care workforce is a great priority for us in the Welsh Government, and we have invested significant funding in the sector, in addition to the local government revenue settlement, in order to develop a sustainable social care workforce. For example, we've given £34.4 million to local authorities through the workforce and sustainable services grant; £13 million across regions to support workforce development and training through the Social Care Wales workforce development programme administered by Social Care Wales, which is also Welsh Government funded; and £10 million, over three years, investment in the social worker bursary to make the social work degree financially attainable and to attract people to an attractive career, and we have already seen a rise in the number of people applying to social work courses because of the bursary, so I think that is good progress there.

In addition to this, we continue to protect investment that will build community capacity to enable vulnerable people to live and stay well at home, and that is our aim—for vulnerable people to live and stay well at home. Some examples of that: the £146 million regional integration fund, the RIF, is supporting 187 projects providing integrated health and care services in our communities. These projects and services work with our most vulnerable people to enable them to live as independently as possible in the community, helping to prevent the need for hospital admission or to help them return home quickly if they've needed hospital care. And many of those projects are specifically geared towards that.

Since 2022, we're providing an additional £12 million over three years to improve neurodevelopmental services, and also, from 2022, we've invested £42 million to deliver much-needed support to unpaid carers. I know that Gareth mentioned unpaid carers specifically in his contribution, and they do hold the whole system together, and I think we all acknowledge that. We're also investing capital funds, via the integration and rebalancing capital fund, to support the development of integrated health and care community hubs, ensuring that people have easier access to information, care and support within their own localities. This capital fund is also supporting the development of not-for-profit residential care facilities across Wales, and I'm sure that the Member of the Senedd for the Vale of Clwyd would be interested to hear—or, I'm sure, he knows—that we've recently agreed funding of over £7 million for the development of a 56-bedroom residential home on the Croes Atti site in Flint to provide residential care and integrated care services for older people in Flintshire, and I'm looking forward to visiting this site very soon.

Further to this, we must not forget our commitment to supporting our wider community delivery partners within the third sector, without whom many vulnerable people would feel isolated and unable to achieve what matters to them. The regional integration fund is investing over £23.7 million in this crucial sector, along with the £9.3 million that we will be investing next year via our five-year sustainable social services third sector grant.

I've been working this winter very closely with my colleague the Minister for Health and Social Services, and she has also invested an additional £8.4 million to build community capacity and increase community nursing at weekends, including for those people who are on end-of-life care pathways. I know, in his contribution, James Evans specifically mentioned people who were waiting in hospital and who were medically fit to go home. That is one of our highest priorities, because, obviously, it's very damaging for people to stay in hospital when they are medically fit and able to go. And we have worked very closely on this issue, working with local authorities and building up the partnership. In fact, we had a meeting today of our care action committee, so I can assure you that this is one of our highest priorities.

We have carried out really extensive work across the health and social care sector to try to get swift discharge from hospital in order to prevent further deterioration. Health boards and local authorities have been formally reporting on their pathways of care delays, and we've now got a much more specific way of reporting on the pathway of care delays and we're now able to take a much more focused approach in order to tackle delays. As a result, we have made significant progress, I would say, in already reducing the number of people waiting to go home or to go on to their next stage of care, and we're expecting more figures very soon that I think will show that we're on the right trajectory, that we are going the right way and numbers are coming down. So, these are just a few examples of the work we're doing to support what we know are some of the most vulnerable people in Wales.

However, over the last 30 years the population of Wales has grown by 8 per cent, or 232,000 people. The population is also ageing, with the number of people aged over 65 increasing by 35 per cent, from 493,000 to 666,000, and we do expect this trend to continue. For that reason, we do have ambitious plans to do more in order to ensure we have a sustainable and effective health and care system for the future.

The expert group report, which came about as a result of the co-operation agreement with our partners in Plaid Cymru, 'Towards a National Care and Support Service for Wales', tells us, as does the evaluation of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014, that the fundamental aims and principles of the legislation that we've got in place are still relevant and are still very widely supported. So, we have therefore been working very closely with a wide range of stakeholders to develop the foundations of a national care service for Wales that will help to improve the consistency and quality of social care services across Wales and support more effective implementation of the Act. I think, as I've said, that the legislation, the Act, is absolutely fine, but we have still a long way to go in terms of the implementation.

So, to set the foundations for achieving the aims of the Act and moving us towards a national care and support service, we are implementing a major programme of improvement and transformation that includes the launch of a national commissioning framework for care and support services, establishing a national office for care and support services, the elimination of profit from the care of children and young people who are looked after, strengthening and supporting our workforce, strengthening partnership working across health and social care and developing an integrated community health and care system, and building capacity and capability to support our most vulnerable children and young people to be cared for closer to home.

With the support of our co-operation agreement partners, our commitment to developing a national care service will help to improve and standardise social care systems and practice across Wales and ensure our services are high quality, consistent and truly person centred, supporting people to achieve what matters to them. This will, in turn, strengthen the contribution social care can make to our regional and local partnership arrangements that bring local authorities, health boards and the third sector together to plan and develop integrated community services that help people achieve what matters to them.

So, once again, I thank Gareth Davies for the opportunity to respond to his debate and to reiterate my ongoing commitment to supporting our most vulnerable people and to share just some of the plans of what we're planning to do to further strengthen social and community-based care in Wales.

Thank you very much for your time today.

Thank you, Deputy Minister. And that brings today's proceedings to a close.

The meeting ended at 18:19.