Debate contribution: Home Care Provision

Debate contribution by Mr Alan Chambers on 12 May 2026.

MLA: Mr Alan Chambers
Party at the time: Ulster Unionist Party
Date: 12 May 2026
Type: Debate contribution
Business: Private Members' Business
Heading: Home Care Provision
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 5528668

Text

The motion is right in recognising the enormous contribution that is made by home care workers. They are people who carry out physically demanding, emotionally draining and deeply responsible work every day. As has already been said, they travel huge distances. They work unsociable hours. They support people with increasingly complex needs. Their duties are always delivered with kindness, compassion and a willingness to go the extra mile. However, very often, sadly, they do so with far too little recognition. Meanwhile, demand continues to grow year after year. The Health Committee has regularly heard that home care pressures are being compounded by rising demand, workforce shortages and ongoing funding constraints. Almost 2,800 people across Northern Ireland are living with assessed, unmet home care need. That should concern every Member. The truth is this: for too long, social care has been treated as the poor relation of our health system. The COVID pandemic shone a spotlight not only on the importance but on its fragility, so I very much welcome the Minister's focus on it. Every MLA knows that, when home care collapses, pressure floods straight back into our hospitals. Frankly, one of the greatest frustrations in the debate is in listening to parties claim to support community care while they repeatedly fail to provide the financial certainty that is needed to sustain it. It is remarkable to listen to parties emphasise the need to invest in social care when they sit around an Executive table that still cannot deliver the long-term financial certainty that is needed to sustain it.
Indeed, the motion would perhaps have been more credible had it not come from the party whose Finance Minister is urging other Ministers to do everything that they can to avoid increasing the budgetary shortfalls that they face. Despite all the speeches about valuing care workers, there are still political parties that present an image of there somehow being easy answers. There are not. If there were, policies would have been introduced long before now. I fully support the introduction of the real living wage. Many home care workers should have been receiving the real living wage long ago. They carry out difficult and exhausting work in all weathers, often travelling significant distances between calls, all the while holding together a service on which many families now completely rely. Let us be honest enough to tell the public the full story. Sustainable workforce models cannot be built on financial chaos. Transformation cannot be delivered through annual firefighting exercises. Scandinavian-style public services cannot be promised while there is a refusal to take difficult budgetary decisions. Six weeks into the new financial year, where is the urgency about the lack of a Budget? There is none. That is an outrageous position for the Executive and the Assembly to be in. Political motions such as the ones being debated today do not pay mileage bills, recruit staff or discharge patients. If we are serious about sustaining home care, we cannot simply continue doing more of the same. I am quite sure that the Minister believes the same. Home care workers deserve far more than warm words from the Assembly. They deserve political leaders who are prepared to stop using social care as a rhetorical prop, while they quietly avoid the political actions and leadership necessary to sustain it. Until the Assembly is finally prepared to match its rhetoric with financial and political reality, I worry that motions such as today's are increasingly being used by some to try to distract from the wider, fundamental decisions, or lack thereof, from the Executive.

597 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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