Budget Resolutions

Debate between Graham Stuart and Daisy Cooper

Wednesday 6th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), who has given another customarily powerful speech and reminded us of the injustices facing those who fall between the cracks.

We live in an uncertain and unstable world, and the US election result makes it more so. As we debate how to rebuild our great country after the mess left by the Conservatives, many of us will have a sense of apprehension today about what the presidential result means for the US—including women and minority groups—as well as for the UK, Europe and the world. Families across the UK will also be worrying about the damage that President Trump and his Administration may do to our economy and our national security, given his record of starting trade wars, undermining NATO and emboldening tyrants such as Putin. None the less, that may well be the context within which we must rebuild Britain.

We Liberal Democrats believe that rebuilding Britain starts with rebuilding our NHS and social care. Never before have I heard so much desperation as at the last general election. The legacy of the last Government was to leave people saying that they could not see a GP or a dentist, and were waiting months for mental health assessments or special educational needs documents. People were asking me on the doorstep whether maybe everything was so broken that it could not be fixed at all, but we Liberal Democrats know that health and social care must be fixed hand in hand. We welcome the Government’s investment in the NHS, but they cannot remain silent on social care—they cannot dismiss it as a second-term issue. Businesses know that people’s productivity plummets when they have to pick up the pieces of a broken social care system.

[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Lady makes absolutely the right point about the NHS and its interdependence with social care, but the Government have done more than be silent on social care: through the minimum wage and the NICs, they have imposed £2.5 billion of additional costs on social care while giving just £600 million to local authorities. They are taking an already difficult situation and making it rather worse.

[Daisy Cooper]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for making that point. He may remember that at Deputy Prime Minister’s questions two weeks ago, I raised precisely that point with the Deputy Prime Minister and advised the Government that if they went ahead with the rise in national insurance contributions, it would affect social care. The right hon. Gentleman will, however, remember that it was the Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson who stood on the steps of Downing Street in 2019 and promised to reform social care “once and for all”, but clearly failed to do so.