The Liberal Democrats are calling for a higher minimum wage for social care workers to help tackle staff shortages.

Under the party’s plans, staff would be paid at least £2 an hour more than the minimum wage – currently £9.50 an hour for over-23s.

Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said carers were not valued enough, and vacancies had left the NHS “on its knees”.

The government said it was working to reduce vacancies, and is increasing funding for social care in England.

The UK national minimum wage sets out the lowest amount a worker can be paid per hour by law.

The rates are decided by the government, based on the recommendations of an independent advisory group, and change every year.

More than half of frontline care staff – 850,000 workers – would see their pay improve if there was a £2 an hour uplift to the minimum wage for the sector, according to the Resolution Foundation think tank.

A rural domiciliary carer has said that rising fuel costs are one of the reasons for the lack of staff.

Ash Turner works for New Dawn Care in Craven Arms, south Shropshire, and said the mileage she gets back, only just covers her fuel costs.

About 130,000 new care workers are needed each year in the UK just for the social care workforce to cope with current demands, Age UK said.

“I’m now out of pocket for insurance and wear and tear,” Ms Turner said.

“Before the fuel crisis, I would have had money left over if I needed my tyres doing,” she added.

Ms Turner said she paid about £100 a week to fill up her car and said on her days off, she thinks “can I go to Shrewsbury, can I do this because I need the fuel for work”.

As Ms Turner works in a rural area, she said she often has to drive up hills and down country lanes to reach her clients.

“We’ve got more problems working in a rural place, and there are loads of pot holes,” said the carer.

Rachel Wintel, manager at New Dawn Care, said they can only afford to pay 35p a mile.

“This is because currently local authorities aren’t able to pay travel time or mileage in the packets of care that we pick up, as providers we pay mileage and we pay travel time,” Ms Wintel said.

The lack of social care staff is also affecting the hospitals and ambulance wait times due to hospital staff “not being able to discharge patients who are medically fit to go home or to go into rest and rehabilitation care,” MP for south Shropshire and former health minister Philip Dunne said.

The large number of unfilled NHS job vacancies is posing a serious risk to patient safety, a report by MPs says.

It found England is now short of 12,000 hospital doctors and more than 50,000 nurses and midwives, calling this the worst workforce crisis in NHS history.

It said a reluctance to decisively plug the staffing gap could threaten plans to tackle the Covid treatment backlog.

The government said the workforce is growing and NHS England is drawing up long-term plans to recruit more staff.

Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who chairs the Commons health and social care select committee that produced the report, said tackling the shortage must be a “top priority” for the new prime minister when they take over in September.

“Persistent understaffing in the NHS poses a serious risk to staff and patient safety, a situation compounded by the absence of a long-term plan by the government to tackle it,” he said.

New research published by the House of Commons has revealed the scale of the mental health crisis currently impacting rural areas.

The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee (EFRA) is conducting an inquiry into rural mental health and has published evidence submitted by the Countryside Alliance based on a survey conducted over Christmas.

The survey uncovered a broad spectrum of experiences of mental health and healthcare, and suggested that a key driver of ill-health was a lack of appreciation and respect for the rural way of life, from policymakers to individuals.

Attracting a total of 717 responses and over 1,700 individual comments, the survey was designed to elicit information that would be useful in addressing those questions being considered by EFRA that respondents would be well placed to comment on.

The inquiry is considering questions relating to the specific mental health challenges faced by rural communities, as well as mental health services and how well they meet the needs of rural populations.

The EFRA Committee will also look at suicide rates among agricultural workers and related occupations, and the effectiveness of prevention services.

A shortage of beds for severely unwell eating-disorder patients has forced the NHS to send more than 100 women from England to hospitals in Scotland for treatment since 2017.

The cost of relocating patients, which included under-18s, was more than £10m, with one patient staying more than a year in hospital, costing close to £250,000.

The Guardian spoke to families who warned of the toll of travelling hundreds of miles to see unwell relatives. One mother said she had spent hundreds on petrol to visit her daughter and had slept on the hospital floor after being unable to get a hotel.

Experts say that not being close to family and friends can hinder the recovery of many people with mental health problems, as they are isolated from their support network.

Campaigners have warned of a crisis as demand for treatment among those experiencing anorexia and bulimia has “skyrocketed” since the start of the pandemic. Newly released data shows admissions up 84% in five years.

Levelling up secretary Michael Gove last week unveiled the government’s long-delayed plans to address regional and social inequalities, but cash-strapped councils across England are having to plan heavy cuts to frontline services after more than a decade of ongoing austerity. Recent funding increases have not undone £15bn of cuts in central government grants to local authorities between 2010 and 2020, and councils wrestling with the impact of Covid are set to pass a succession of savings measures plus widespread council tax increases. Several local authorities are facing votes on service cuts in the coming weeks.

The survey of the most senior executives running hospitals, ambulance services, mental health providers, community services, primary care and integrated care systems comes hours before new performance figures for the NHS in England are due to be published.

The number of people waiting for hospital treatment in England has hit a record high of 5.7 million as the NHS struggles to clear the backlog of care that has been worsened by the pandemic. Updated figures are expected on Thursday.

The greatest areas of concern for NHS leaders are primary care, and urgent and emergency care, according to the survey.

Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “Almost every healthcare leader we’ve spoken to is warning that the NHS is under unsustainable pressure, and they are worried the situation will worsen, as we head into deep midwinter, unless action is taken. They are also sounding alarm bells over risks to patient safety if their services become overwhelmed, on top of a severe workforce crisis.

“The health and social care secretary says the NHS is not under unsustainable pressure, but NHS leaders are clear that we have reached a tipping point. Frontline providers across all parts of the NHS are under intolerable pressure.”

Nursing shortages are allowing “profiteering” staffing agencies to triple their rates, care leaders have warned, raising the risk of vulnerable patients being forced to move care homes and increasing the burden on the NHS.

The crisis is forcing some nursing homes to become standard residential care homes without support for people with chronic diseases.

The shortage also makes it harder for NHS hospitals to discharge patients. Some hospitals have redeployed their own staff into nursing homes to free beds in hospitals. In other places, NHS trusts are competing for staff with care providers.

Geoff Butcher, director of Blackadder Corporation, which runs six homes in the West Midlands, said that he paid nurses about £19.50 an hour, slightly higher than the NHS rate of £16.52. “Two of our nurses resigned recently and they’ve gone to an agency for £35 an hour,” he said. “And that agency then came to us and said we can have these staff back at £52 an hour. They want £95 an hour for those nurses on a bank holiday nightshift. It’s utterly unaffordable.

Ministers are to fund a network of “family hubs” in England as part of a £500m package to support parents and children.

The centres in 75 different areas will provide a “one stop shop” for support and advice, the government said.

The funding, to be announced by the chancellor in Wednesday’s Budget, will also go towards breastfeeding advice and mental health services.

Labour called the plans a “smokescreen” for failing to deliver for families. 

Kate Green MP, Labour’s shadow education secretary, said family hubs were “a sticking plaster for a fractured childcare and children services landscape”.

“This supposed commitment rings hollow after 11 years of Conservative cuts have forced the closure of over a thousand children’s centres, cutting off the early learning that sets children up for life,” she said.

The funding includes £200m to support 300,000 families who face complex issues that could lead to family breakdown. 

Some £82m will be given to 75 local authorities to fund the new family hubs, while another £100m will go towards mental health support for expectant parents.

And £50m will be spent on breastfeeding support – including antenatal classes and one-to-one support – to build upon best practice from areas such as Tower Hamlets in London, which has the highest breastfeeding rates at six to eight weeks in England.

The Conservatives have ordered a shake-up of NHS leadership in England on the eve of their party conference, with Sajid Javid saying that with more funding must come “change for the better”.

The health secretary said he wanted to see the most far-reaching review of NHS bosses in England for 40 years, appointing a former vice-chief of the defence staff, Gen Sir Gordon Messenger, to lead the work.

However, some NHS bosses were furious about what they described as a political move to shift blame on to trust, hospital and social care leaders as the health service struggles with a big backlog.

Under the terms of the review, Messenger will be asked to look at the best hospitals, GPs’ services and social care delivery to work out how this can be replicated across the country.

Tory sources said it was not about a reorganisation of leadership structure or apportioning blame for failure but “identifying the best leadership, finding out why it’s so good and looking at how we roll it out more widely”. They said it was a key plank of “levelling up”.

No structural shake-up is expected in social care, it is understood, but the government could be open to more national leadership in the sector.

NHS bosses criticised the review as a “slap in the face” after the pandemic. Some said they saw it as a deliberate attempt to shift the blame for the health service’s fragility. In recent days Nottingham’s main acute NHS trust has had to cancel planned chemotherapy sessions due to a lack of nurses and East Surrey hospital declared a “critical internal incident”.