Health and Social Care Budgets

Debate between Adrian Bailey and Clive Betts

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Betts]

We will return to the proper training, long-term commitment and pay of staff in the care sector in our Committee’s further report, but we certainly had evidence to that effect.

We need another way of dealing with the funding gap for the rest of this Parliament. For the longer term, I very much welcome the announcement of the Green Paper, but I echo the comments of the two previous speakers. We need to get cross-party agreement on a sustainable, long-term settlement that will last not merely for the next Parliament, but for several Parliaments after that. There are major challenges. I agree that we should look at health and social care together, but there are fundamental differences in governance and accountability between the two systems, so how do we resolve that?

We should certainly look closely at what is happening in Manchester, to learn about the devolution deal there and how the two can work together within the same governance structure. Personally, I feel that losing the local accountability that the social care system currently has and simply centralising the whole system would be a mistake. That would take us in the wrong direction, so it is important to look at what is happening in Manchester. We have two very different funding systems. We have the health system, which is free at the point of use, but I do not think that anyone suggested in evidence that we could fund social care on exactly the same basis. We will have to consider something slightly different to fund social care, but how the two systems fit together will be a challenge.

If we are considering the future for social care funding, we should bear in mind that currently we have a mixture of funding. We have some central Government funding, local authority funding and the personal contributions that come through people paying for their care, particularly in residential homes, and what happens to their estate when they die. Will that mean a bit extra from those different elements—a bit more from central Government, local Government and personal contributions—so that the total whole grows? However, the Government have said that they will introduce the Dilnot proposals in the next Parliament—that is what the Minister said to us—which will cap and reduce the contributions that may come in from people’s private estates when they die, so does that mean more money from somewhere else?

I am sorry that the Chancellor did this, because everything should be on the table, but he ruled out a different way of taxing or receiving contributions from people’s personal estates when they die: taking a percentage of everyone’s estate. Currently, people contribute their estate if they end up with dementia and go into a care home, but if they have a heart attack, they tend to contribute nothing. Is that system fair? Is that a challenge we must look at? Even with Dilnot, the £72,000 limit would take most of the estate from a small house sold when someone in my constituency dies, but it would be only a fraction of the value of a property sold in the more expensive parts of London. Is that fair either? Do we simply scrap the whole thing and go on to a German system of social insurance?

The Communities and Local Government Committee went to Germany to have a look at its model. There are pros and cons to it, but we really need to put everything on the table and not rule out any possibilities. We need something that we can, in the end, reach cross-party agreement on, recognising that the social care system will probably be different in its funding from the health system. How they can fit together and be governed together will be absolutely crucial to the success of a long-term settlement, when we eventually reach one.

[Mr Adrian Bailey (in the Chair)]

I remind Back-Bench contributors that there is a three-minute time limit. I call Anne Marie Morris.