Budget Resolutions
Debate between Barbara Keeley and Angela Eagle(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
We have heard a wide range of speeches this afternoon, including from the hon. Members for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin), for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak), for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab), for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), and from the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who is no longer here. We also heard excellent speeches from my hon. Friends the Members for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), for Croydon North (Mr Reed), for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) and for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) and from my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz).
I shall mainly talk about social care, but I want to mention the absence of any Budget help for the 1950s-born women struggling without their state pensions owing to the 1995 and 2011 Pensions Acts. Their demonstration and lobbying here yesterday were wonderful. I am also sad that the Chancellor could not find £10 million for the children’s funeral fund, which was campaigned for so ably by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris). Despite cuts from central Government, my local authority has recently announced that it will waive fees for child burials, but all the weight of that should not be put on councils.
I had hoped that this Budget would finally announce a Government funding commitment to start to put the social care sector on a stable footing. The Chancellor said that everyone should be able to
“enjoy security and dignity in old age.”—[Official Report, 8 March 2017; Vol. 622, c. 820.]
However, despite his rhetoric, it is clear that his Budget did not match up to that aim. As we have heard, the King’s Fund has put the current funding gap for social care at around £2 billion. Yesterday, the Chancellor announced additional funding of £2 billion over three years, of which only £1 billion will be available this year. That is half of what is needed to deal with the immediate crisis. The Care and Support Alliance commented that that the funding will
“keep the wolf from the door”
but no more. There has been much discussion about the future and what will happen to that extra funding, but we must bear it in mind that post-Budget figures for adult social care show a 2.1% cut between 2016-17 and 2019-20, showing that funding is still being cut in this Parliament.
Along with council leaders, social care providers and health leaders, the Opposition have been warning this Government for many months about the perilous state of the social care sector. Indeed, the King’s Fund recently said that adult social care is
“rapidly becoming little more than a threadbare safety net for the poorest and most needy older and disabled people.”
Last week, the care company Mitie offloaded its two homecare businesses for £2, which is a clear demonstration of the fragility of the current care market. That company, which had provided care and support to 10,000 people and employed 6,000 staff, was reduced to being worth only £2. It has taken until now for the Government to heed the many warnings, and they were wrong to wait so long to act, just as they were wrong to cut local government budgets by around 40% since 2010, which has led to cuts of £5.5 billion from adult social care budgets by the end of this financial year.
Ms Angela Eagle
Does my hon. Friend also recognise that the cuts to benefits, particularly to housing benefit, will have a huge effect on extra care? Large numbers of people are very happy, well looked after and protected in those arrangements, but they cannot pay for them if housing benefit goes. Moving those people into nursing care will cost far more a week. That is another ticking time bomb.
Barbara Keeley
My hon. Friend is right about extra care housing.
The Chancellor was wrong not to make any extra funding available for social care in the autumn statement. Instead, Ministers chose to continue putting the burden of funding social care on councils and council tax payers. The local government finance settlement compounded the mess by recycling money from the new homes bonus to create the adult social care grant. That rather inept settlement made a third of councils worse off, including my own Salford City Council, which loses an extra £2 million from budgets this year.
One council that did not lose out from the settlement was Surrey County Council, which will gain £9 million extra from the adult social care grant. Perhaps that should not surprise us, given that the settlement was made when Surrey was in the middle of a long, drawn out and clearly highly successful lobby of Ministers to get more funding for just that council’s social care.
Last night, Surrey County Council released many documents and texts revealing the extraordinary level of access that that one council enjoyed with Ministers and their advisers. My local authority recently asked for a meeting with the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to discuss our difficult financial situation and the loss of funding for social care. We were given a 30-minute meeting with one of the Under-Secretaries of State. However, the leader of Surrey County Council was given meetings with the Secretary of State on 12 October, 19 October and 9 January. There were a number of further meetings with the Secretary of State to discuss Surrey County Council’s funding situation involving the Chancellor, the Secretary of State for Health and other Surrey MPs. There was also a substantial stream of letters, emails and texts, some of which may make surprising reading. Some frustration was expressed about the Communities Secretary, with one Surrey MP saying:
“Sajid led me to understand before Christmas that he would be trying very hard…to help Surrey out with the worst of its (Government-dictated) financial dilemma.”
And he said that if the Secretary of State was
“imprudent enough not to have £40m hidden under the Department sofa for just this sort of emergency/problem”
and if all the Secretary of State’s local government money really is allocated, he
“still has the option of adjusting all other Council settlements down very slightly in order to accommodate the £31m needed for Surrey—and I think he should be encouraged to do this.”
In January that Surrey MP wrote that he was
“losing hope re getting help from Government this time, we still need to kick up such a fuss that Ministers and Civil Servants really do remember at the very least ‘they will need to treat us better next time.’”
I think that refers to the new funding formula. All this about a council that the Chancellor himself told in a letter in December:
“Surrey’s core spending power in 2016/17 decreased by 1% compared to an average reduction of 2% for shire counties as a whole”.
And the Chancellor said that over the lifetime of this Parliament
“Surrey’s spending power is forecast to increase by 1.5% compared to a flat cash settlement for local government as a whole”.
It seems that Ministers were not ready to listen to most council leaders, care providers, local authorities and their own regulator about the fragile state of social care funding, but it is clear from all the correspondence—I recommend that hon. Members read that correspondence, as it is very interesting—that relying on council tax and business rates to fund social care will never give us the fair and stable funding system that we need.
As I said earlier, there will still be cuts of 2.1% to social care up to 2019-20, so what we have in this Budget is a sticking plaster or a stopgap announcement that will not give older and vulnerable people the “security and dignity” in old age that the Chancellor claims. And it will not enable us to deal with the continuing demographic challenges that we face. The number of people aged 75 and over is projected to nearly double by 2039. That ought to be something to celebrate, but instead the Government have created fear and uncertainty for older people by failing to address the health and care challenges raised by those demographic changes. The Chancellor said that the Government intend to produce a Green Paper in the autumn on long-term funding options, and there has been some discussion of that in this debate, but given that we have already had the Barker review and the Dilnot commission, there are fears that the Government could be kicking this issue, once again, into the long grass.
I hope that the Government are not doing that, because cuts to social care budgets hit not only people who need care, but the 6.5 million unpaid family carers. Carers UK tells us that an estimated 1.6 million people currently provide 50 hours or more of care per week, which is an increase of a third since 2001. Some 2 million people have given up work at some point to care for loved ones, and 3 million carers have had to reduce their working hours. That is not good for their finances, with many falling into poverty as time goes on.
As people live longer with disabilities and long-term health conditions, more of us will find ourselves having to take on a caring role. Sadly, this Budget offered nothing to carers, just as it offered nothing to women born in the 1950s and nothing to families who were bereaved after losing children. There was nothing in it for carers, no extra support and no sign that this Government value the important work that they do. I say to the Minister that £120 million would deliver a three-hour respite break each week for 40,000 carers who are providing full-time care; instead, as we know, the Government have chosen to prioritise cuts to inheritance tax and corporation tax, and to ignore the increased burden on unpaid family carers.
The Government have also failed to recognise that the social care crisis is not just about older people. The Chancellor talked about the impact that the £2 billion over three years will have on delayed discharges, but, as councils have reminded us this week, other groups of people need social care, including those with learning disabilities. About a third of councils’ annual social care spending—some £5 billion—goes on supporting adults with learning disabilities. Surrey MPs must now understand that fact, after all the correspondence from their council leader, who spent a lot of time trying to make clear to them what an issue that was for councils.
We had an excellent debate in Westminster Hall earlier in the week on social care in Liverpool, when we heard that Liverpool had lost almost 60% of its grant since 2010 and that that will reach cuts of 68% by 2020. Cuts to social care there have meant that funding for care packages had to be cut, so whereas 14,000 people were receiving one now only 9,000 are—5,000 people are no longer getting a care package. Surrey, which has had so much attention, did not have cuts at that level; its cuts were only 28%. Indeed, social care spending in Surrey has increased from £273 million to £367 million.
I want to make an observation about the new allocations for the £2 billion that the Government have announced. I observe—that is all I can do, because the figures have only just arrived—that the allocations are £1 billion for year one, two thirds of a billion for year two, and one third of a billion for year three. In that, Surrey’s allocation goes up in year two; it is one of only six councils on the whole list that gets a bigger allocation out of a smaller amount of money. I do not know, and it is impossible to see here in the Chamber, what the formula is, but that position is very worrying.
Disturbingly, this important matter of funding social care has been tarnished by the offering of sweetheart deals and the making of gentlemen’s agreements. It seems, from reading the correspondence, that all of that was done to escape the political heat for some right hon. and hon. Members facing the reality of what cuts to council funding have done to social care in their local authority area. That is what this is all about: threats of what will happen to constituencies and areas if the cuts go on.
Social care should not ever be consigned to becoming a threadbare safety net. We also should not have a Communities Secretary who can hold more than seven meetings with Surrey County Council or Surrey MPs to discuss their funding, yet who will not meet a cross-party delegation from Salford City Council and has no time in his diary to meet the leader of Hull City Council. I hope the Communities Secretary will start to listen to councils other than Surrey County Council, whose leader emphasised in letters that we have seen that it has the largest Conservative group in the country. He should also listen to leaders from Hull, Croydon, Salford, Manchester, Liverpool, Durham and Newcastle. He needs to understand from them what is needed throughout the country to save social care from crisis.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Debate between Barbara Keeley and Angela Eagle(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
The Leader of the House would not give way when he was speaking about part 2. There are some key issues for coalitions of charities. The shadow Leader of the House mentioned health issues such as smoking. There are big differences between the parties on some of these issues and there could be a chilling effect on a coalition of, say, health and social care organisations that was campaigning for the particular stance that one particular party might be advocating. Charities are worried today. We have talked to them this morning. The Leader of the House may shake his head, but they are worried. He has got it wrong.
Ms Eagle
My hon. Friend is right. Lawyers who have looked at the changes that the Government are proposing to make in part 2 agree with the worries of the charitable sector. A mere assertion from those on the Government Benches that the measure does not mean what everybody else thinks it means will not be enough to reassure people on these matters.