Social Protection and Social Responsibility in the Care Industry New legislation needed

Additional legislation is needed to strengthen the legal basis for redress within the Health and Social Care Bill 2011. A counter-balance with social work values is needed to Part 3, Chapter 2 of the Health and Social Care Bill 2011. Without this price competition and competitive process will be unworkable and interfere with fundamental rights. A Code of Practice for Social Protection and Social Responsibility will enable public authorities and third party public bodies, to look to the future and recognise that anything other than clear, transparent decision making will increasingly be seen as unacceptable. We must ask why is it that when so many industries have recognised that one of the keys to developing industry excellence is not to inspect defects out, but to create systems in which defects cannot arise. In the care industries, investigations of systemic failure has become an industry in itself. Behaviour management standards that are in place are designed to ensure the care quality and economic welfare of providers. The term welfare has a specific meaning in EU Competition law and is wholly dependent on economic models of competition this will only add further frustration and complication to delivery of public and social policy and social welfare law. A progressive stance on EU and domestic rights is urgently required. We must ratchet up our expectations of what can be delivered against these rights and offer UK providers a seedbed to become the world's most successful. Health and social care are too important in developing the social value of economic growth to be allowed standards that are, sometimes, second best. World-class commissioning has not ensured excellence in health and social care so a detailed, robust and tightly structured charter of fundamental rights must. Why should we expect anything other than this in the care industries? Other industries like cars and phones already have this in place. Cases of failures dominate discussion of the care industry. Dozens of articles and reports provide a rule of thumb - organisational insight is inversely related to the number of articles cited to reinforce it. Little has been said about the acquired employment rights of temporary and low paid and unpaid care workers. The current draft of the Bill is silent on what an effective remedy really is? And what does the term 'concerted practice' actually mean? The key driver of health and care management lies in establishing a Code of Practice for Social Protection and Social Responsibility. This will inform the success or failure of commissioning in relation to EU and National law on organisational behaviour by adding an unambiguous statement on fundamental rights and social responsibility. In short, successive Governments for the past thirty years have failed to tame these structural problems and protect the fundamental rights of those most affected by reform of the welfare state. A House of Lords amendment or Ten Minute Rule Bill titled the Health and Social Care (Code of Practice for Social Protection and Social Responsibilty) Bill 2011 is now urgently needed. Front line staff and team managers continue to achieve great things for local residents in the face of increased pressures from purchasers, regulators, and residents themselves. Nevertheless, it would be condescending to pretend that these achievements are sufficient to satisfy what is becoming an increasingly demanding user base. Increasingly, the range of new approaches and methodologies are becoming integral to the way in which care is delivered. Market Studies, Purchaser Interdependency Matrix, Supply Chain Logistics, Price Discovery Mechanisms, Common Procurement

Vocabulary, Category Sourcing and Management and Contract Management are all pivotal to the way in which the industry evolves. Of course, care quality will always be central, but increasingly we will all have to recognise that some of these economic approaches may be in conflict with the ethic of caring. Indeed some have already argued that marketisation, managerialism and codification are aligned solely to welfare economics and not social justice. They are not wrong. A Code of Practice for Social Protection and Social Responsibility will provide a mechanism for improving and st amplifying the ethic of caring - a framework for 21 century care management safeguarding the rights of service users, and local residents in an increasingly complex and diverse world of welfare economics. Health and Social Care will continue to be an economic growth area. For example the Office of Fair Trading (2005) estimated that the residential care home industry was valued at 8 billion a year; there are few UK industries that can boast about such growth and we have to ask who really benefits. A code of practice for social protection and social responsibility will address these sewn-in issues head-on, not least because the real care economy of low paid temporary workers and informal carers continues to grow without adequate legislative protection. My final points on these structural issues is that real progress cannot be made until all stakeholders recognise that whole system improvement demands that they have a detailed understanding of fundamental rights and social responsibility. Such an understanding needs to be in place to resolve issues of subsidiarity and derogation and the role of competition that will arise. There is an urgent need to re-educate front line staff, team managers and senior management in the industry from top to bottom.