Social Care Funding (EAC Report)

Baroness Sanderson of Welton Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)]

My Lords, I also commend the members of the committee for their impressive report. We are fortunate to have such distinguished and experienced Members of the House of Lords focusing their attention on one of the most difficult and urgent problems of our time.

Despite that urgency, and as many others have said, this it is a problem that successive Governments have ultimately failed to confront, although I was struck by the comments from Care England, in the report, about the lack of progress over many years, despite all the different reviews and commissions,

“all of which seem to come to similar conclusions—the system needs to be properly funded.”

The committee has made its recommendations and they have been broadly welcomed. While I fully appreciate the difficulties of the past year caused by the pandemic, I hope the Minister will be able to give some indication as to when the Government will be able to respond to its recommendations.

I also appreciate that, for there to be a proper response to this issue, there needs to be the type of cross-party co-operation that the committee has so ably demonstrated. For there to be wider consensus, there needs to be a better understanding of the social care system. The committee quite rightly says that, for this to happen, the system needs to be less complex and easier to understand.

I am no expert in this area but I emphasise that, if we are to have a proper conversation, we need to stop treating social care as the NHS’s poor relation. As demonstrated by this debate, this is not a new concept by any means and was part of the 2019 Conservative Party manifesto, but the pandemic proved again that we have some way to go. The desire to protect the NHS was understandable, but we now know that policies designed to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed pushed a greater burden on to care homes. Yet again, social care was deemed the second-class citizen.

As my noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean pointed out, by 2023-24, the NHS annual funding increase will be

“more than the entirety of local authority adult social care expenditure.”

This situation surely cannot continue, but if any good has come from the pandemic, it is a greater focus on and appreciation of the fundamental role that social care plays in protecting many of our most vulnerable.

Care England suggested in the report that there was

“a hesitancy by politicians to increase funding for a system that is not well understood by the public”.

Meanwhile, the Nuffield Trust pointed out that new proposals

“are often put forward as part of election campaigns at a point in the electoral cycle when there is minimal incentive for cross-party cooperation.”

As we reach a point of greater understanding and with some years until the next election, I sincerely hope that this is the time to find consensus and for Government to finally come forward with the solution that has evaded us for so long.