You never know when you will need social care. For most of us, it is in older age, but illness or accident can come to us all and with it the need for extra help.
In Southwark we are working hard to make sure the right help is there for when you, or a family member, need it.
We’re investing over £7.4 million next year in social care.
We’ll be using this money to provide care for over 2,200 people in their homes and 680 in nursing and residential care homes.
We are also investing in the family members who do the caring with our new £500,000 Southwark Carers’ Fund.
We’ll be working with unpaid carers across our borough to work out how best to spend this money, focusing on the things that will make the most difference to carers and the people they care for. All as part of our 2024 Year of the Carer.
I know from my own family experiences just how import it is that care is good quality.
Providing that quality care is getting harder and harder under a Conservative government that has failed to have any coherent plans for social care for 14 years.
You might remember that after the last General Election, Boris Johnson said he had an ‘oven ready plan to fix social care’. Well, four years and two more Tory Prime Minsters on, nothing has emerged from that oven.
However, in Southwark we working very hard to deliver our own plan, and unlike the Tories’, ours is real.
Our Residential Care Charter guarantees both decent standards of care for residents who receive care at home and proper taring and decent pay for care workers, of London Living Wage based on the real cost of living.
Both matter because care workers can’t be their best for the people they are supporting if they are living on poverty wages.
Because of our work in recent years we have seen satisfaction with home care in Southwark went up from under 60% to over 90%.
We are now rolling out a similar standard to all of the care and nursing homes in our borough – the first of its kind in the country. Again, it grantees fair pay and proper training for staff, as well as a stronger say for families in the care of their loved ones.
We are also delivering new and better care homes. Last year we opened a brand new nursing home in Camberwell and this month I’m delighted to say we have purchased Tower Bridge Nursing Home, rescuing it from closure.
The owners of this home wanted to sell of the home, which would have left over a hundred local families struggling to find new homes for their loved ones. We have stepped in as a council to keep it open, and now it is in the our ownership we will be working to drive up standards.
It’s not just nursing homes we are opening. This year we will also be opening 2 new flexi care homes for disabled and older adults. These are individual homes that come with care on site that you can flex up as you needed it. Starting with perhaps a couple of visits a week and the reassurance of on-site help when you need it, and increasing the support you get as you need more. All the way up to two or three visits a day.
There’s much more I could mention. Including the £1.5million, we are investing in local community groups like Age UK, Southwark Pensioners and Link Age Southwark.
Having visited many of their services I’ve seen first had the incredible work they do to help people stay connected and well.
There’s also the brilliant work our local alms-house are doing. The wonderful Appleby Blue in Bermondsey has set a new standard for quality homes for people in older age.
Our action is starkly different from that of the Tories. They have had fourteen years to fix Britain’s broken social care system but all they have delivered is broken promises.
That’s why this year we need to show the Tories the door and elect a Labour Government who can rebuild Britain with a new National Care Service that drives up standards and quality – based on the foundation we have already laid in Southwark.