Care and Support

Andy Burnham Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement—and, indeed, for the constructive cross-party discussions that we have held on these crucial matters.

First, let me say that we welcome many of the ideas in the White Paper that the right hon. Gentleman is publishing today. A universal deferred payment scheme would help to spare vulnerable people the agony of watching savings and assets being washed away. National standards on eligibility could help to bring some consistency to a care system in England that is today the ultimate postcode lottery. Stronger legal rights for carers are overdue, as are improvements to end-of-life care.

The proposals are important steps forward; they were also in my own White Paper, “Building the National Care Service”, which was published before the last election. I take the right hon. Gentleman’s decision to carry the proposals forward into his White Paper as a positive sign of the developing consensus between the parties, but there is one crucial difference between his White Paper and ours. Despite the obvious political risks of doing so, we faced up to the difficult issue of how to pay for care and support in the century of the ageing society. The Government have failed to do that.

With no answers on money, the White Paper fails the credibility test; it is half a plan. The proposals that the right hon. Gentleman has set out are in danger of appearing meaningless and may raise false hope among older people, their carers and families. The proposals have no answers to the immediate funding crisis that is engulfing councils and resulting in thousands of older people seeing support taken away or facing huge increases in charges for day care and meals on wheels—stealth taxes on the most vulnerable in our society. Furthermore, there are no answers on how we pay for a fairer care system in the long term. Let me take each of the two issues in turn. I shall start with council funding.

Today we have a promise of new standards, new services and new rights for councils to deliver. I fear that that will be greeted with sheer disbelief in town halls up and down England. Councils are already facing a major funding shortfall, estimated to be at least £1 billion. They cannot cope with what they already have to do, never mind their being burdened with additional unfunded pressures. What is the Government’s assessment of the extra costs that will fall to local authorities in England from the proposals in the White Paper? Will the Secretary of State tell us how and when he plans to pay for those costs, as well as make up the existing shortfall in council budgets?

There is simply no point in promising new ideas if they come on top of the crumbling foundations of inadequate care budgets. Councils need emergency support. The right hon. Gentleman has allocated just £100 million and £200 million today, but last week it was confirmed that the Treasury had clawed back £1.4 billion from the Department of Health budget. Surely it would have made sense to have reallocated at least half that clawback—£700 million—to council budgets, to relieve pressure on care. Does he not accept that such a move is needed if his plans are to have any credibility in local government circles?

Let me turn to the flagship proposal—the new duty on all councils to provide loans to older people so that people can pay care costs after they die. Before we judge that, we need more detail. Can the Secretary of State tell us what the upfront set-up costs will be to local authorities? Currently, there is a deferred payment scheme based on no interest, but we read that, when his scheme is up and running, councils will be able to charge interest so as not to lose money.

Will the Secretary of State confirm that that means that councils will have to charge close to commercial rates of interest? Does he not accept that, if that is the case, taking on such large amounts of debt might be very frightening for older people? Was it not for that very reason that the proposal really made sense only if it came as part of a package alongside a cap, as promised by the Dilnot commission? This is the problem with the Government’s White Paper: they are adopting a pick-and-mix approach to the Dilnot package, which was conceived as a coherent and complementary whole.

That brings me to my second issue. I hear talk only of a vague commitment in the progress report to the main principle of Dilnot, so are the Government not in danger of sliding back on their own independent commission, which had produced the best hope for years of a consensus between us? I know, perhaps more than anyone, how politically charged these issues are, but I also know that progress will never be achieved if politicians cannot put difficult options on the table for fear of being accused of political point scoring. That is why my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition made a genuine offer of cross-party talks to give the coalition the political space to look at those difficult options. I thank the Secretary of State for the way in which he conducted those talks—indeed, I thank the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), too—and I have welcomed his idea of producing a joint progress report on funding.

I do not doubt the Secretary of State’s personal commitment to making progress, but I suspect that he was thwarted by the Treasury and a Chancellor who is making one wrong judgment call after another. The Government’s decision to change course at the eleventh hour and produce their own progress report, without input from Labour Members, reflects a Treasury decision to try to close these issues down—a mistake and a missed opportunity. Let me say this to the Government: if they offer a genuine, two-way discussion on the funding of care, with honesty about existing pressures and the difficult options, we will play our part, but they cannot expect us to provide political cover for a failure to face up to the scale and urgency of the care crisis in England. To do so would be to fail the millions of older people, their carers and families who have already waited long enough for politicians to get their act together.

The truth is that the Government are ducking one of the biggest issues of our time, with a White Paper that has today been branded a “massive failure” by the Alzheimer’s Society. Today’s announcements are designed to create a false sense of momentum and to disguise a Government decision to kick the funding of care into the political long grass. They have made their choice—they have placed Lords reform at the top of the agenda and shunted the care of older people into “Any Other Business”. That is the clearest sign yet of a Government who are losing their way and have their priorities completely wrong.