Dementia: Accident and Emergency

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Wednesday 11th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Lord is quite right to point out the delay in providing an answer on social care. That is why the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care wrote to Peers earlier this month, initiating a round of cross-party conversations and putting in the diary the beginnings of a process to pull together cross-party agreement. That cross-party agreement is essential to providing a long-term solution to this important problem.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I want to pick up on the point of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, about the lack of any extra funding for social care in the Budget. There was a reannouncement of just over £1 billion from before Christmas, but the Local Government Association states that social care generally needs about £4 billion to be able to maintain any sort of service to meet demand, which rises to £14 billion by 2030. Just saying that we are getting together to start to talk about social care problems is not enough. Where will extra money come from to remove people from hospital who do not be need to be there and to fund social care properly?

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Baroness is entirely right to say that this is an important issue. Short-term funding has been put in place for the best possible short-term arrangement, but this is a long-term problem that cannot be solved by any Government on their own. It requires cross-generational and cross-party agreement. That is why an important and well-organised set of engagements has been initiated. It is timetabled, and the Government have committed to action in this area.