Social Care Strategy

Baroness Murphy Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Murphy (CB)]

My Lords, the helpful House of Lords Library briefing paper by Eve Collyer Merritt started with great clarity. The opening statement was:

“Social care services help people living with illness or disability”.


That is so often forgotten. I think the people in this Chamber today know that—we would not be here if we did not. Indeed, I see assembled before us a number of what I would call the usual suspects for debates of this kind. However, vast sections of the population do not comprehend at all what social care services are. When we have a candidate for leading the Conservative Party who refers to carers recruited overseas as “bottom wipers”, I find myself in an angry rage at her astonishing ignorance, and feel that many politicians require some educating.

That problem explains, in part, the catastrophic neglect by successive Governments, who come to the elections and find that nobody is the slightest bit interested in it as a vote winner. It seems that this Labour Government, whom I expected better of, are also kicking the can down the road. That is one theme that I think will remain constant through this debate today.

The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, set out clearly and admirably the challenges, and I can do no more than repeat her words and support her call for a long-term strategy for what should be a growing workforce and the desperate need for training of staff too—especially in dementia, I would say. In view of the fact that over half of home recipients of care and over 70% of care home residents have a degree of dementia, it is surely unacceptable that fewer than half of residential carers have any training whatever in how to manage that condition. I suppose that at this point I ought to draw the House’s attention to my lifelong professional interest in this area and current role as an ambassador with the Alzheimer’s Society.

Since the Dilnot commission report of 2011, there has been talk of capping care costs in residential care, but I am pleased to say that the one thing the Government have said is that they do not support that line. Capping costs simply transfers the burden from those who have the resources, albeit often locked up in property and capital assets, to the Government and, by extension therefore, to the working population through taxes. It has the effect of unjustifiably allowing older people who need residential care to hang on to properties and pass them on to their children, while adding an extra tax burden on to younger people, most of whom will not own homes. There are many ways to ensure that payment can be deferred so individuals and spouses do not have to pay and, in that sense, I agree with the Government’s announcement.

I do not think we can ever get away from the profound unfairness that was established in 1948, when healthcare and social care were separated. We are in danger of recreating a national care service which makes all the same mistakes as the behemoth of the National Health Service. Please do not move away from having a locally focused and locally accountable social care service. By all means have a national strategy but not, please, a national care service.