Wed 4 Mar 2020 13.20 EST
Last modified on Wed 4 Mar 2020 13.45 EST
Frances Ryan says there are 122,000 social care “vacancies”, implying that 122,000 jobs are available with nobody to fill them (It’s children who will fill the carer gap, Journal, 28 February). The 122,000 figure is an estimate of workforce shortages in adult social care, not vacancies.
Over the past two years I have sought out such vacancies for a family member. On NHS Jobs this morning I found four social or adult care vacancies in Liverpool – and precisely zero on Liverpool city council’s recruitment page. Competition has been fierce for the few jobs that do come up.
In the wake of Boris Johnson’s new immigration plans, there seems to be a perverse liberal will to understate the reality of unemployment and to scoff at the idea that the phrase “economically inactive” conceals mass unemployment. Only last autumn your economics correspondent reported that more than 3 million people are missing from unemployment figures (and that Liverpool’s true unemployment rate is 19.8%) – specifically after “students, retirees and people caring for family” are removed.
We should be able to oppose Tory immigration policy without giving credence to the toxic myths that either there is near-full employment (a Tory idea now thoughtlessly redeployed against them) or the unemployed are workshy.
Peter McKenna
Liverpool
“Would you ask a stranger to give you root canal work or rewire your house?” (Experts debate: will registering care workers reduce risk or restrict choice?, 27 February) Probably not, although the issue is arguably less about the practitioner being unknown and more about them demonstrating competence. The debate on registration of care workers raises important issues both for and against. Karolina Gerlich argues for registration and training to be undertaken by the National Association of Care and Support Workers (of which she is CE), but this is a professional membership organisation, not an independent regulator. How would this operate? A voluntary registration system would be of limited value, and registration in itself will have little traction without accompanying regulatory powers.
While registration and accompanying professional development could offer an important route to raising the status of social care work and protecting people using services often delivered out of sight within their own home, attention needs also to be paid to the arguments from people who will always prefer to choose their own care and support workers, with or without registration. As Clenton Farquharson countered, direct payments enable people to decide for themselves who to employ to support them as they wish, rather than feeling they are being driven into the task-focused model of a care agency.
Developing a flexible model of regulation that focuses on values and user-defined outcomes must be at the heart of any new system.
Melanie Henwood
Hartwell, Northants
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/04/care-sector-shortage-regulation-and-unemployment
