Social Care

Baroness Keeley Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for giving me advance sight of her statement, but it is a woefully inadequate response to the Opposition day debate we held in this place on Wednesday 25 October and in no way addresses the motion passed by the House.

That motion called on the Government to note

“the Conservative Party’s manifesto commitment to a funding proposal for social care which would have no cap on care costs and would include the value of homes in the means test for care at home”,

and we called on the Government not to proceed with their commitment to those proposals. The Minister has today finally confirmed what many of us on the Opposition Benches suspected: they will not be proceeding with their plans to cap care costs by 2020, as legislated for by the House. This a shameful waste of taxpayers’ money. Over £1 million in today’s money was spent on commissioning the Dilnot review, and it was a waste of parliamentary time enacting the cap. It is no good for her to say that the Government are consulting on the cap. They consulted on this during the general election, and their proposals were rejected by the electorate. Meanwhile, very many people are still faced with the catastrophic costs of paying for their care.

The motion also called on the Government

“to remove the threat to withdraw social care funding from, and stop fines on, local authorities for Delayed Transfers of Care”.

During the debate, I talked about how Ministers had previously threatened councils with fines and further funding cuts to social care if targets for cutting delayed transfers of care could not be met—fines for targets that half of social services directors believe to be unrealistic. Will the Minister confirm that the Government have listened to the will of the House and will stop these fines, which merely threaten to make the crisis in social care worse?

The motion also called on the Government

“to commit to the extra funding needed to close the social care funding gap for 2017 and the remaining years of the 2017 Parliament.”—[Official Report, 25 October 2017; Vol. 630, c. 312.]

At no point today has the Minister confirmed how the Government intend to enact the will of the House in meeting the funding gap—and of course, shamefully, there was no mention of social care in the recent Budget. Our social care system remains in a perilous state because of the cuts that this Government have chosen to make. The Care Quality Commission has told us that the social care system still remains at a “tipping point”. Will she now confirm that the Government will enact the will of the House and meet the funding gap?

The Minister in her statement addressed the Government’s decision to include the views of carers in the upcoming Green Paper and their failure to respond to the consultation of 6,500 other carers that has already taken place. As I mentioned in the debate, Katy Styles, a carer and a campaigner for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, contributed to that consultation and hoped that her voice would be heard. She told me:

“Not publishing the National Carers Strategy has made me extremely angry. It sends a message that carers’ lives are unimportant. It sends a message that Government thinks we can carry on as we are. It sends a message that my own time is of little worth.”

Will the Minister give more details on the scope of the carers action plan and reassure those 6,500 carers that their time was not wasted?

The Government announced recently, and the Minister confirmed today, that working-age people with disabilities would be consulted as part of a “parallel” workstream to the Government’s Green Paper consultation. Why a parallel workstream? This is an extremely short-sighted approach to reforming social care, and far from one that looks at the system in the round. Will she give us more details about the parallel workstream for working-age people with disabilities who have social care needs?

It is clear that only a Labour Government can deliver much-needed reform to our social care system. Over the coming months, we will also consult experts on how we can move from the current broken system of care to a sustainable service for the long term. We will look at funding options for social care in the long term, such as a new social care levy, an employer care contribution and wealth taxes. These experts will help to clarify our options for funding our planned national care service, and our approach will be underpinned by the principle of pooled risk, so that no one faces catastrophic care costs, as they do now or as they would have done under the Conservative party’s earlier dementia tax proposals.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

The hon. Lady will not be surprised to hear that I did not agree with much of what she said, but I will address some of her points.

Fundamentally, we are setting out, as has long been established, how to get a longer-term, sustainable system for funding our social care. It is absolutely clear from our debates during the past year that, as far as the public are concerned, there is a real lack of understanding about how, at present, the cost of care has to be met by the person who requires it. That is what leads to catastrophic care costs, and the dementia tax that she keeps mentioning, and that is exactly what we are going to tackle by having a cap on the overall cost. In doing so, it is very important to take the public with us and to have a fully informed public debate. It does not matter how far we think we have had such a debate in this place when legislating in the past, because it is quite clear that the public do not understand this. [Interruption.] We are only going to get public consent for a long-term solution if we have a public debate that is handled with maturity, and so far we have not seen very much of that.

The hon. Lady raised the issue of carers, and she suggested that carers’ voices are not being heard in this debate. [Interruption.] I say to her that they very much are being heard. [Interruption.] She can sit there and chunter, or she can listen to the answer to the question. It is entirely up to her, but it is rather a waste of my time in coming to this place if I am just going to be talked over. [Interruption.]