12. Submissions on Behalf of the Trades Union Congress by Mr Jacobs

Mr Jacobs: Good afternoon, my Lady. These are the submissions of the Trades Union Congress.

The TUC brings together over 5 million working people who make up its 48 member unions. Those affiliated unions with a particular interest in Module 6 include Unison, GMB and Unite, each of which represent a substantial number of those who work in the sector.

The experiences of those who work in the sector and the experiences of those who rely on residential or domiciliary care are, my Lady, two sides of the same coin. One depends on the other, and in that sense the TUC has an interest in the array of issues to be considered in this module.

But of course it is the experiences of those who work in the sector upon which the TUC’s input will be particularly focused.

The challenges faced by those working in the sector were obviously significant and some of the fault lines have already been canvassed in Modules 1 and 2 and in submissions of others before you today, which I will not repeat.

We were grateful to hear Counsel to the Inquiry in opening to note the 1.5 million who work in the sector in England alone and some of the characteristics of the workforce.

These summary submissions will focus, my Lady, on one point. It is the extent to which this module will need to consider, in the discharge of your terms of reference, some of the structural challenges facing the sector which pre-existed the pandemic.

My Lady, perhaps something of a theme in some of the submissions before you today.

Counsel to the Inquiry in their written note, and again in submissions today, describe that it is not part of the Inquiry’s terms of reference to consider the state of adult social care systems in the United Kingdom prior to the pandemic, save where necessary to understand how the pandemic impacted on adult social care.

As a matter of principle, that is no doubt correct, but it begs an important question: to what extent is it necessary in order to understand how the pandemic impacted on adult social care to consider the state of adult social care systems prior to the pandemic?

The TUC says that the inescapable reality, however messy and difficult it may be, is that the impact of the pandemic is a function of the state of the adult social care system going into it.

The extraordinary challenges of the pandemic met with the challenges of a chronically underfunded and fragmented social care sector, delivered by many thousands of local authority and private care providers with little central strategic direction, oversight and data, served by an understaffed, underpaid and undervalued workforce, many in insecure work.

In an echo, I think, of an observation made by Ms Campbell on behalf of the Northern Ireland Covid Bereaved this morning, these matters will be relevant not only to understanding the impact of the pandemic, but also to the making of meaningful recommendations. That is because, my Lady, change cannot be achieved in a vacuum from the structural challenges.

Your Counsel to the Inquiry addressed this issue this morning and said this:

“… [that] it may be that the pandemic threw a harsh and painful light on issues such as pre-pandemic underfunding and the undervaluing of the adult social care sector, but Module 6 is focused on the impact of the pandemic, not on those wide-reaching and historic concerns and problems, and so, in [Counsel to the Inquiry’s] submission, it is not, therefore, within Module 6’s remit or scope to seek to fix or address those long-standing issues …”

My Lady, that was a submission made, entirely properly, of course, in recognition of the need to adhere carefully to your terms of reference, but, respectfully, we say that it is mistaken. The place to which it may inadvertently lead is that it is not the function of this Inquiry to fix the roof but to focus on where best to place the buckets that catch the dropping water. That, my Lady, would be a mistake.

At the very least, we urge this module to gather the evidence and for you, my Lady, to proceed with an open mind. The conclusion of a full and fearless Inquiry might ultimately be that the roof needs to be fixed. That a problem is historic does not mean that it is not relevant to pandemic response, and it may mean that a recommendation addressing it is desperately needed.

You cannot, my Lady, as you observed just a few moments ago, fix all of society, but we do invite the funnel of your investigations to start broadly and not to cast some of the broader structural issues to one side for fear of them being too broad or having a political hue. They may prove to be centrally relevant.

In a related point, it was observed by Counsel to the Inquiry that this module does not intend to repeat Module 1, clearly it should not, but Module 1 considered resilience and preparedness up to the start of the pandemic, including in the social care sector. That leads to what is perhaps the most important and relevant of questions: how did those features of resilience and preparedness play out during the pandemic? In that sense, Module 1 must be a platform for this module, Module 1 need not be repeated but its evidence and findings should be of core relevance, and we hope that that is what is envisaged.

My Lady, the structural challenges to which we invite your focus are set out in more detail at paragraphs 9(a) to 9(j) of our written submission. I do not repeat the detail of those matters here, but we invite careful consideration of them.

In our written submissions, we do also make observations in respect of expert evidence, Every Story Matters, and the important role of the evidence of frontline staff to this module, but on those matters we stand behind our written submissions and do not repeat them here.

My Lady, unless I can assist further.

Lady Hallett: No, thank you very much, Mr Jacobs.

Ms Curtain, I think you complete the submissions.