Predatory financial practices and the adult social care sector

That this House welcomes the Panorama episode Crisis in Care: Follow the Money, broadcast on 6 December 2021, on the involvement of financial entities such as private equity firms and hedge funds in the adult social care sector; notes that this has put pressure on the sector to grow its revenues, not to improve quality of care but to meet exorbitant costs associated with complex corporate group structures, high debt burdens, and offshoring of profits; further notes that as much as one sixth of the weekly fee for a residential bed can go towards interest payments on company debt; further notes that this financially extractive and growth-dependent model is draining adult social care of funds and plunging the sector deeper into economic precarity; believes that the Government’s focus on developing new funding streams for adult social care fails to address this crucial underlying problem; calls on the Government to address these predatory financial practices by amending the Health and Care Bill to prevent financial assistance being used to rescue overindebted private companies in the care sector, to require providers of adult social care in England to report annually full financial accounts for all companies within the same corporate group including offshore entities, and to review the financial regulation of the adult social care sector to identify ways of reducing the large financial costs and risks created by financial engineering practices such as debt loading, asset stripping, and the offshoring of profits.