Health and Social Care Levy

Gareth Johnson Excerpts

1st reading
Wednesday 8th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I welcome the extra funding that is going into tackling the backlog of cases in the NHS. Dartford has been particularly badly hit, with Darent Valley Hospital this week having perhaps its busiest week in many years as it tries to deal with the backlog. I ask the Treasury team, working with their colleagues in the Department of Health, to ensure that the extra money that will be invested in the national health service gets through the treacle of bureaucracy that can quite often affect extra funding for the national health service, so that it can reach the frontline without being siphoned off in various directions on its way through. I welcome the fact that the Government have had the courage to deal with this issue. We can argue about whether the plans are the correct plans, and whether we are funding them in the right way or the wrong way, but it would not be a very wise argument to say that we should carry on kicking this can down the road. It is very welcome that we are confronting this problem head on and dealing with the issue.

It is slightly surprising that we have not seen much support from Labour. I could help my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) in understanding what the Labour party’s plan would have been had they been in power for the past 11 years. The Labour party had a plan for how to deal with social care in its 2015 manifesto, which says that extra public funds were needed, which I think we all accept, that a cap on contributions to social care should be imposed, and, crucially, that it could be funded by a social care levy. That was the position the Labour party took in 2015. It was so happy with that policy that it had it again for its manifesto in the 2017 general election. So that is exactly how the Labour party would have approached this situation: with a social care levy. That is what is proposed by the Government, and it is therefore slightly surprising that we have not seen more support. As my hon. Friend said, we saw Gordon Brown come to the Dispatch Box in a Budget and increase national insurance by 1%. He did not mention it in his Budget speech—we all found out about it in the Red Book afterwards—but that was his approach then.

We have consistently seen the Labour party supporting exactly what the Government are proposing to do today, but instead of Labour Members supporting it, we have received the class attacks referenced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning). That shows that they have learned nothing from the last few general elections. They have learned nothing from their experiences of dealing with working-class people. They do not understand that working-class people actually have aspirations—aspirations to own their own house and to save some money where they can, and not to have that house, and everything else, pretty much, that they own taken away from them if they happen to need social care at the end of their lives. It is trying to ensure that those aspirations are met that has ensured that the Conservative party has made far more progress with working-class people than the Labour party, which has simply lost contact and lost connection with the people that it used to serve. I am therefore surprised that Labour Members are not supporting this, and they should perhaps reflect on that decision. I again pay tribute to the Government for having the courage to deal with one of the most difficult issues that faces British politics today.