Adult Social Care

Debate between Gillian Keegan and Daisy Cooper

Wednesday 1st December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

I thank my hon. Friend for all her work in this area. Obviously, I have just come in at the end of the journey and many, many people have been working on this issue for many, many years. They should all take credit for that work and for reaching this point. She has my firm commitment that the Government are absolutely committed to fixing social care. As I said, we cannot level up without fixing social care, and of course we all have a vested interest in having a very good social care system.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

This statement is incredibly thin. It feels as though the Government are trying to fiddle with the light bulbs on the Titanic as it is starting to go down. We have an enormous crisis, where people who need care cannot get it and end up going into ambulances, ambulances are now queueing up outside hospitals, and hospitals cannot discharge patients back into their homes or the community because the care is not there. The statement and the White Paper do not address the fundamental problem of fragmentation and integration. The Minister has already accepted that this is now just a first step. Will she be clear with us today on when she will bring forward concrete proposals for how to tackle the problem of fragmentation and integration between the NHS and care?

[Gillian Keegan]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right that the complexity is broad. We have always anticipated that we would have winter challenges to deal with. With the global pandemic, there is a backlog of all kinds of things that people need—diagnosis, operations, electives and so on—plus all the other challenges such as winter flu and new variants of covid, which are still here. That is why we have specifically put a winter plan in place; we have also set out hundreds of millions of pounds of extra funding to look specifically at the winter challenges and the discharge process. It is not easy, because of the absolute growth in demand. We knew that it was always going to be challenging, and we regularly monitor and measure it with our NHS colleagues.

The hon. Lady mentions a fundamental pillar: the integration of health and social care. That will be subject to another White Paper, which will come early next year and will have more details about integration. She is absolutely right that it is another solid foundation on which social care reform will stand.