Council Funding and Social Care

Debate between Huw Merriman and Adrian Bailey

Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Huw Merriman]

I very much take the hon. Lady’s points. I certainly do not advocate a mansion tax, and I do not believe that my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon was calling for one either. There is an argument that, if social care continues to be funded locally, there needs to be an additional stamp duty so that, if an asset in Surrey is sold and downsizing occurs, the money actually follows someone into the county. That should not be required, because it does not really make sense for social care to be funded locally, but if it remains locally funded, I agree that we have to start thinking radically about how we spread the money around.

I recognise that the Government have acknowledged that there is a challenge in the system. That is the first step. The right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle mentioned the concept “all is well”. We will hear from the Minister, but I constantly hear the Government acknowledge that there is a challenge and a requirement for reform. We need additional funds between now and reform so we can get through this stage, but reform is ultimately the answer. I believe the Government recognise the challenge, so I have great confidence that we will overcome it.

I also recognise that £3.5 billion of extra funding will be put in through the social care precept and the improved better care fund by 2019-20. I hear the point that some of that is backdated and will not come on stream until later, but the Government have listened to that point to a certain degree and allowed councils to increase the social care precept levy to 3%. My county is doing that. The levy will be 3% this year and 3% the following year, but of course it will then go down to zero, which is why reform will be needed at that point. The transfer of the new homes bonus from the district level to the county level has also buffered my county council against some of the increase in costs.

I welcome what the Government are doing and the tone that they have adopted, but ultimately we need reform. I absolutely believe that we need to look at the entire system, including financial services. For example, we talked about property. I believe that there is a problem with equity release, which people cannot get from their high street banks because they just do not offer that service. Anyone who wishes to tap into their property’s value to pay for their care in older age has to go via an insurance company, which is incredibly difficult. I have discussed that with the banks. They have a concern about their bills for recent mis-selling fiascos—they shy away from explaining what equity release means for people in their older age because they were sued so successfully for previous mis-selling scandals. We need financial services reform, too.

We must also look to the future. Why do we not have care individual savings accounts for people—perhaps for people of my age—who should be saving, in the same way that we have help to buy ISAs? We need to look more along those lines. We must be absolutely honest and open that an asset will be sold in totality to pay for care. I regard my house as the asset that I will use for that. I doubt very much that my children will ever see a penny from it. We need to have that conversation with the public, who I believe are ahead of us in this game. Ultimately, people who care for their relatives should be able to inherit, but people who do not should not expect to inherit, because the state will have to pay for that care and the cost will have to be recovered. We need to start talking in that language.

We must also look at reform of the care home sector. Of the 35 care homes in my constituency that were reviewed by the CQC, 29 were less than good. That is an absolute disgrace. The issue with care homes largely is that they are in old buildings with fire hazards, there are not enough staff to look after people and strangers still share rooms. There must be incentives in the system so that new care homes are built, which is why I recently called for care homes to be delivered by local government. Some people took that as a call for renationalisation of the sector, but I did not mean that; rather, when putting planning applications through, local government should require developers to build care homes in the same way that they require schools and GP surgeries to be built. If we put such incentives in the system, we will have the funding in place and the old buildings will be sold. Planning consent requirements should be lowered for the care home sector, which would lead to new buildings.

Local ideas are often the best ideas. The council house sale reform in the ’80s, which Opposition Members may not have agreed with, was a local idea. We have merged the two budgets in the East Sussex Better Together funding programme. We are taking a lot of money out of the primary care system—40% of the budget will come out of hospitals and go into social care. East Sussex is one of the three pioneers that recognise that this is one problem, so there needs to be one fund and one programme. That can be done locally and is being led locally by East Sussex. Rather than talking purely about the challenges, I will finish by talking optimistically. Answers and solutions are being found and delivered locally, and I very much hope they succeed.

[Mr Adrian Bailey (in the Chair)]

We now come to the Front-Bench wind-up speeches. Will the Front Benchers between them leave a couple of minutes at the end for Alan Johnson to reply to the debate? I call Neil Gray.