Council Funding and Social Care

Debate between Alan Johnson and Melanie Onn

Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Alan Johnson (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to conduct this debate under your excellent chairmanship, Mr Bailey, particularly as I hear you are going to Hull on Monday with the Industry and Parliament Trust, which is a great organisation. It shows that you are a man of discernment and great taste, and you will have a good time in the city of culture—and I would not dare to ingratiate myself with you at the start of the debate!

Adult social care in England presents the biggest domestic political challenge of our time, and that includes how to fund it, how to ensure it is more closely integrated with health and how to ensure that the system is sustainable in an ageing society where demand is bound to continue to rise. In the past week alone, while Parliament has been in recess, Age UK has said that the system is moving from crisis to collapse. A report by Oxford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine concluded that problems in adult social care are behind an unprecedented increase in mortality. If we look at the statistics we see that mortality has gone up, but the normal infant mortality measure is not the cause, nor is the mortality rate of babies born after 28 weeks, which is a big factor. However, the adult mortality rate has gone up by 5.7%, and the report says that is due to problems in adult social care in England.

The debate today is about one strand of the enormous challenge, and it is very much focused on the short term: how local authorities will be able to maintain, let alone improve, services over the next few years. In relation to the debate about the long term, I was Health Secretary 10 years ago, and I was heavily engaged in the internal debate within the Brown Government about the need to devise a completely new and substantial stream of funding for adult social care. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) became Health Secretary after me. He managed to reach a consensus with the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats that was disgracefully scuppered by Andrew Lansley during the 2010 general election campaign. That attempt to find new money was disparagingly referred to by the then Conservative Opposition as a “death tax”, complete with pictures of tombstones on their election posters. It may have helped them to dislodge Labour, but it did not help them to solve the problem.

The Dilnot inquiry subsequently made a number of suggestions, including the eminently reasonable one that people like me who are working beyond state pension age should pay national insurance. That was quickly dubbed the “granny tax”. Between the death tax and the granny tax, the national debate on how we find the means to tackle this crisis has rarely managed to rise above the glib and the facile.

I applaud the recent cross-party attempt to convince the Prime Minister of the need to find a new cross-party consensus. Perhaps the Chancellor is even now working on the final details of a great and imaginative scheme that can attract all-party support for a national solution to a huge and growing problem. His autumn statement was an enormous disappointment. While he may mistakenly believe that the biggest crisis he faces is how to defuse the considerable row over business rates, he needs to understand that the interlinked issue of adult social care—interlinked for reasons I will come on to— overshadows everything in his in-tray and in the Cabinet’s in-tray.

It is traditional in debates of this kind for somebody to say that the problems are not all about money. I have no doubt that the Minister is preparing himself to fulfil that role in this debate, but I am afraid that in respect of adult social care, it actually is all about money. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, direct funding to local authorities will have fallen by 80% by 2020. I repeat: 80%. Adult social care is not ring-fenced. Some £4.6 billion was slashed from those budgets in the last Parliament, with the result that we spend less on social care now than we did in 2010. Those are House of Commons Library figures obtained yesterday. It is less in cash terms, which is even less in real terms, and all parties agree that the problem is mainly caused by underfunding.

In written evidence submitted to the adult social care inquiry last year, the King’s Fund said that

“the fundamental cause of the problems in adult social care is inadequate funding.”

We can talk about innovative ideas and methods that councils across the country are employing, including my council in Hull—they are doing brilliant things to try to deal with some of the wider issues—but the basic fundamental problem comes down to cash and funding. Indeed, the scale of the problem is such that in evidence to the same inquiry, the chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, said that were any extra money to become available from anywhere it should go not to the NHS—his own organisation, which he was representing—but to social care. That was a remarkable and unprecedented act of self-denial in respect of access to public funds.

Pending the Budget and the outcome of further deliberations by the Government on the issue, the solution that this Administration have pursued with the most vigour is simply to pass the buck to local authorities. Let us for the sake of this debate accept the premise that local authorities are best placed to deal with the issue and that the adult social care precept may be the new funding stream that has proved so elusive. Even if we accept all that, the first point that the Government must surely acknowledge is that the amount raised does not begin to match the scale of the problem. The precept in 2016-17 raised £382 million, which is less than 3% of council spending on adult social care. However, it would have been a very welcome 3% increase, were it not for the fact that implementation of the national living wage cost those same councils an estimated £612 million, wiping out the additional money and leaving councils with a deficit on this issue alone of £230 million.

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

There are some 850,000 people living with dementia in the UK, and their care is usually more expensive than standard elderly care. We have seen £160 million taken out of adult social care budgets between 2010 and 2016. When it comes to the adult social care precept at the local authority level, does my right hon. Friend agree that it is destined to create a postcode lottery and impact further on the services that people expect to receive in times of great difficulty?

[Alan Johnson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that, and I will talk about the widening inequalities in a second. She was also right to refer to dementia sufferers. Too often in this debate—I am perhaps guilty of this, as well—we deal with dry statistics, percentages and precepts, when at the end of it there are people who are very vulnerable and need care, above all dementia sufferers. We have to tackle that and ensure that the inequality gap does not get wider. I will come on to that in a second.

Trade Union Bill

Debate between Alan Johnson and Melanie Onn

Monday 14th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Alan Johnson]

I think that could be described as a wildcat intervention. Let me tell the hon. Gentleman that the result of this legislation will be more wildcat strikes. Yes, there are other countries where people are not allowed to strike. Postal workers in America, for instance, are not allowed to strike. In this country, prison officers and the police are not allowed to strike. In every single system like that, there is a process of employment relations and a process to air grievances that give a distinctive advantage to those industries in getting a result. According to the Secretary of State, the Bill does not say that there are industries in which strikes should not take place; it is an effort to affect millions of trade unionists and inhibit their right to strike because of a dispute involving a few thousand people at London Underground. That is the truth of the matter.

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the description of strikes as “wildcat” is wildly inaccurate, because there is a very detailed process that every organisation must go through in order to allow its members to take industrial action?

[Alan Johnson]

That is an extremely important point. Another important statistic is that one in five industrial action ballots does not lead to any industrial action being taken. That tells us, among other things, that trade unionists do not take industrial action when the support is lukewarm.

What is interesting to me is that there is nothing in this or any other Government Bill that is designed to improve industrial relations—nothing like the partnership fund or the union learning fund that we set up to encourage both sides to come together. I tell the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) that, as a junior Minister, I once presented the partnership prize, which was a substantial metal object, to the late, great Bob Crow. Two weeks later, I read in the Evening Standard that there had been a big row between the RMT and London Underground, and that the RMT rep had thrown something at the London Underground manager. I just hoped that it was not the partnership fund award that I had presented.

We took positive action to ensure that the industrial relations climate everywhere across the country was better. There is nothing in the Bill that attempts to do that. As 77 experts in the field said in a letter to The Guardian, the Bill will have the opposite effect. They said that instead of proceeding with this, to use their term, “perverse” Bill,

“the government should be looking more seriously at how to engage and involve the British workforce and its representatives in rebuilding the UK economy and raising productivity”.

I say to Government Members that the Department of Trade and Industry had a review of facility time in 2007. The officials in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills at 1 Victoria Street are exactly the same officials who were at the DTI. There was wide consultation. The outcome was that facility time provided a net advantage to the employer and the country. It was also important in raising productivity—something that this Government have a serious problem with.

With no evidence as to its necessity, the Government have pressed ahead as if this were emergency legislation, scheduling Second Reading four days after the already compressed and laughably short consultation period. The aim seems to be to ensure that our debate coincides with the first day of the Trades Union Congress—a level of immaturity not seen since members of the Bullingdon club thought it would be fun to bare their bottoms outside a convent. Perhaps the Bill was drawn up by the Bullingdon club—perhaps the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip can tell us—and it certainly could not have been constructed more maladroitly if it had been.

The Department from which this Bill emanates is under new management. I suppose we could describe the former Secretary of State as the artist formerly known as Vince, and how we miss the worldly wise maturity of the former Member for Twickenham, who obviously managed to keep the padlock on the playpen in his years at 1 Victoria Street. He described the Bill as

“vindictive, counterproductive and ideologically driven,”

and he has never spoken a truer word in his life.

The central feature of the Bill, which should be disturbing right hon. and hon. Members on the Government Benches, is that it is unprecedented, undemocratic and indefensible. Why? Because it gives a vote in trade union ballots to those who have, for whatever reason, decided not to cast their vote, and it classifies that vote in every circumstance as a “no” to industrial action. I honestly thought that the Secretary of State would give some examples of where such a measure is used. A golf club perhaps, or a local charity—anything where people who do not vote are classified as voting against. If, in a workplace of 1,000 people 499 workers vote in favour of industrial action and there is not a single vote against, that industrial action would be illegal. In the parlance of this Chamber, the noes would have it, the noes would have it.

The abstainers, the apathetic and the forgetful will have a no vote, as will those who miss the post—I love that as a former postman, but this is the only element of society where the only way that anything can be done is through the post. Communication Workers Union members are grateful, but they realise that this is not just about increasing their workload; it about attacking their rights.

If my hypothetical workplace fell under one of the six areas so far defined as important public services, a 79% yes vote on a 50% turnout would be illegal, as would a 64% yes vote on a 64% turnout. That cannot be defended. Someone could be the most rabid anti-trade union politician in the House—there may be some in the Chamber at the moment—but if their concern is for human rights and civil liberties they cannot defend that measure. It is literally indefensible.

We would not consider governing our debates in this House with such a practice. Why not govern our debates in that way if it is a democratic way to do it, so that those who do not vote are counted in the No Lobby? As the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) pointed out there is an issue about how we got our mandate on May 7, and the Secretary of State said, “Oh, but that is not a binary decision.” The European Union (Referendum) Bill that we debated last Monday is a binary decision, and we did not spend a second debating whether people who did not bother to vote should be counted as a no vote. Why not do that? If this is at all democratic, why is it not in that Bill?