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.

Care providers are demanding double the usual fees to look after thousands of people who need to be discharged from hospitals to ease the crisis in the NHS.

Care England, which represents the largest private care home providers, said on Sunday it wanted the government to pay them £1,500 a week per person, citing the need to pay care workers more and hire rehabilitation specialists so people languishing in hospital can eventually be sent home.

The rate is about double what most local authorities currently pay for care home beds, an amount Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, described as “inadequate”.

The demand comes as the health secretary, Steve Barclay promised “urgent action” with up to £250m in new funding for the NHS to buy care beds to clear wards of medically fit patients. The money will be used to buy beds in care homes, hospices and hotels where people are looked after by homecare providers, as well as pay for hospital upgrades. Stays will be no longer than four weeks until the end of March.

Thousands of NHS patients in England will be moved into care homes as part of the government’s plan to ease unprecedented pressure on hospitals.

The NHS is being given £250m to buy thousands of beds in care homes and upgrade hospitals amid a winter crisis.

The move aims to free up hospital beds so patients can be admitted more quickly from A&E to hospital wards.

Labour’s shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, said the announcement was “another sticking plaster”.

The plans will be included in an emergency package to be unveiled by Health Secretary Steve Barclay.

Later in the day, Mr Barclay will outline a series of measures to address pressures on the NHS, including long waits for emergency care and delays to discharging patients who are medically fit to leave hospital.

For 40 minutes an elderly man sat on a bench in a busy city centre park – alone.

He was ignored by the passing dog walkers, joggers, parents with pushchairs and teenagers with headphones, all too busy to even say “hello”.

Did he want company? Did he want to be alone? Did anyone actually care?

It was enough to move one woman to try and get strangers to chat, helping inspire a movement that has spread across the world.

“There was some of that British reserve that made me think he may think me weird if I sat next to him,” said Allison Owen-Jones, 53, from Cardiff.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple way to let people know you’re open to a chat, I thought.

“So I came up with the idea of tying a sign that would open the avenues for people. I didn’t want it to sound too vulnerable so I wrote, ‘Happy to chat bench. Sit here if you don’t mind someone stopping to say hello’.

“All of a sudden, you’re not invisible anymore.”

The idea in May this year led Allison to laminate cards and begin tying them to benches in parks around her home city.

It was a blissfully simple idea to tackle loneliness that swiftly created a buzz.

The Senior Citizen Liaison Team charity took the idea a step further.

It has already set up partnerships with both Avon and Somerset Police and Gwent Police to have permanent benches across their areas and arrange volunteers to “chat-bench”.

We can look closer to home than Germany, the US and Finland to combat rough sleeping (Hundreds of people are dying on our streets. Let’s give them homes, Editorial, 3 October). As a result of Blair’s cross-departmental initiative introduced in 1997, rough sleeping stood at 532 on any given night in England in 2001. By 2018 it had risen to an estimated 5,000 people, and, as your editorial points out, 726 people, or on average two a day, die on the streets.

Yes, a Housing First approach is urgently needed, not least because of the neglect of social housing by successive governments over the last 20 years. A desperate situation has been compounded by draconian cuts since 2010, the impact of universal credit on the most vulnerable, and the cutting to the bone of preventive services to address mental health, drug and relationship problems when they first arise. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we are creating a welfare system underpinned by punishment, regulation and deterrence, that legitimises the sacrificing of the street homeless.

Co-production, which is built on the principle that people who use a service are best placed to help design it, was central to debate at the annual conference of the European Social Network (ESN) in June, when delegates from 35 countries met in Milan to discuss how to raise the quality of care and support in a post-austerity era.

The ESN, which is funded by the European Commission but also draws members from outside the EU, shares knowledge and best practice in social services. It wants the commission to draw up a new framework for quality to guide EU states and others as policy moves on from a primary focus on ensuring continued provision of services in the face of the financial constraints of the past decade.

Katarina Ivanković-Knežević, the commission’s director for social affairs, told the conference that quality was “as important as the availability of social services” and a golden thread running through the 20 principles of the European pillar of social rights proclaimed in 2017.

It was work from Scotland, in the form of health and social care standards introduced last year, that helped shape much of the discussion in Milan. These are intended for all services, not just those regulated by statute, and are based on underlying principles of dignity and respect, compassion, inclusion, responsiveness of care and support and wellbeing.

Peter Macleod, chief executive of the Care Inspectorate in Scotland, said the principles were rooted firmly in a human-rights approach to care and support, and that the goal should be for the individual to be able to say: “I am receiving high-quality care that is right for me.”

A “deeply hidden and disturbing side to rural life” has been laid bare by an 18-month inquiry into domestic abuse in the English countryside.

Domestic abuse victims there suffer for longer, are less likely to report abuse and struggle to get support, it said.

Victims are isolated, unsupported and unprotected in a “rural hell” that protects the perpetrators, the National Rural Crime Network report found.

The government has just set out new plans to tackle the issue.

The researchers carried out 67 in-depth interviews with people who had experienced domestic abuse, and a set of separate interviews with those working in services supporting victims.

The inquiry also included a review of academic literature and a survey of a separate group of 881 abuse survivors, recruited for the research with the help of support services.

It sought to discover how the experience of domestic abuse in rural areas and getting help for it is different from urban areas and why.

National Rural Crime Network chairwoman Julia Mulligan described domestic abuse as “the hidden underbelly of rural communities”.

“We have uncovered a deeply hidden and disturbing side to rural life.

“Far from the peaceful idyll most people have in their mind when conjuring up the countryside, this report bares the souls and scars of domestic abuse victims, who all too often are lost to support, policing and criminal justice services,” she said.

Rural victims were half as likely to report their abuse to others, and experienced abuse for 25% longer, the report found.

And rural isolation is often used as a weapon by abusers, it said.

“Physical isolation is arguably the best weapon an abuser has and has a profound impact on making the victim feel quite literally captive,” the report said.

A study commissioned by Age UK found that large swathes of the country were “care deserts” lacking residential care or nursing homes.

Caroline Abrahams, the charity’s director, said the research showed how “chaotic and broken” the market for care had become after years of underfunding. “If the awful situation set out in this report does not persuade our government to finally get a grip and take action, I don’t know what will,” Abrahams said.

The study, conducted by Incisive Health, an independent health consultancy firm, found that more than one in four postcode areas in England – 2,200 out of around 7,500 – had no residential care provision. Two-thirds (5,300) had no nursing homes, for people with more acute problems.

The report said more than 1.3 million over-65s lived in these areas and risked being unable to get support if they needed it.

The study found that a big driver of the problem was a lack of staff. Vacancy rates for nurses in social care rose to 12.3% in 2017/18. The report said staffing was a particular problem in the south-east, and that high numbers of EU staff in the sector, many of whom have left or are planning to leave, could mean extra disruption from Brexit.

One of the country’s biggest providers of agency health workers has been accused of “profiteering” after trying to charge care homes up to £2,700 to supply a staff member for a single shift.

The Guardian can reveal that Newcross Healthcare, already exposed for fining workers £50 when they call in sick, quoted the sky-high charges in a price list sent out to homes looking for cover over Christmas.

Newcross – which supplies thousands of agency health workers to care homes, many of whose residents have their fees paid by local councils – stated that it would be charging triple its normal Sunday day rates to supply staff on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

According to a price list seen by the Guardian, the firm normally charges £76.84 an hour to supply a head of care, also known as a matron, for a Sunday day shift. At triple rates of £230.52 an hour, this would cost a care home £2,766 for a 12-hour shift.

The company also charges £59.12 an hour to supply a nurse for a Sunday day shift. At a triple rate of £177.36 an hour, it would mean a 12-hour shift for a nurse would cost a care home £2,128.

A normal Sunday rate for a senior carer is £30.12, the document states.

Every few hours, Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated virtual assistant, helps Scott Walker stay well. Walker’s cerebral palsy means he has poor coordination and movement, but since last spring Alexa has reminded him to take his medication, as well as automating other tasks around his home.

Previously, Walker, who works at Next, used light from his television to get into bed, but can now turn the room lights on and off with his voice. “I haven’t fallen since I’ve had this machine,” he says. “It’s feeling you are in control of your life. My father doesn’t have to worry I am taking my pills at the right time.”

An estimated five million UK households have a device that runs either Alexa or Google’s equivalent, according to the research firm Enders Analysis.

While most people use chatbots – software that recognises spoken or written natural language and responds in kind – to play music or get answers to questions, there’s increasing interest in people using them to take greater control of their lives. “It could stop a partner becoming a carer,” Walker points out.

‘We’re going to the pub’: finding a way out of loneliness, one app at a time

Walker’s speaker, provided as part of a pilot run by Hampshire county council for 50 recipients of adult social care, does not replace regular visits from care workers to help with physical movement, but means he can do more for himself.

Many social care visits are brief calls to check on whether, for instance, someone has taken their pills. If chatbots can replace some of these shorter visits, it could mean care workers being able to spend longer on more useful visits.

Graham Allen, Hampshire’s director of adult health and care, says almost three quarters of those in the pilot felt the device helped improve their lives and almost as many felt it had improved their independence, with numbers fairly consistent across different ages. “It’s not a cure-all,” he says. “It needs to be used along with other measures.” But he can see potential for many care service users living at home, and the county’s children’s social services department has just started issuing similar devices.