Recommendation 3

The Department has started taking some action to address workforce challenges in social care, but vacancies have increased by 50% in the last year and the number of people working in social care fell in 2021/22 for the first time in at least 10 years. The NAO report sets out a very high level of social care vacancies in ICSs of up to 13%, and high turnover rates ranging from 23% to 37%. The Department has taken some action to improve the situation, including adding care workers to the shortage occupations list and launching a national advertising campaign. It told us that numbers of both domiciliary workers and care home staff are now increasing. However, as written evidence to this committee sets out, there are now 165,000 vacancies in social care, compared with 110,000 in 2020/21, and the workforce has decreased by 3% in the last year. We challenged the Department on what the £500m it has committed for social care reform would achieve, and it stated this money would be used to support discharge to assess and other measures for domiciliary care. Recommendation: Alongside its Treasury Minute response, the Department should: • write to us by the end of March 2023 and provide a breakdown of how it spent and what impact it achieved, in terms of health outcomes as well as operational improvements, from both the £500m committed to workforce reform in December 2021, and the £500m announced in September 2022 to tackle delayed discharge. • The Department should also write to us within six months setting out the underlying reasons for social care vacancies, its forecasts for them, and its further plans to address them.