Oral Answers to Questions

Jeff Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I am happy to talk further with my hon. Friend. He knows that this is a local matter. It was, I think, looked into in 2014, but if the pattern of demand changes it should be kept under review.

[Jeff Smith (Manchester, Withington) (Lab)]

11. What assessment he has made of the effect of changes to local authority social care budgets on the demand for health services.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (David Mowat)]

Social care plays a vital role in keeping people healthy and independent, which is why the Government are making a further £3.5 billion available by 2020—a real-terms increase over the lifetime of this Parliament. There is an overlap between care and health, which is why faster integration is our major priority.

[Jeff Smith]

The Secretary of State’s Conservative predecessor, Stephen Dorrell, has said this month that we are increasingly using our acute hospitals as “unbelievably expensive care homes”, and he described this as a “grotesque waste of resources”. Is it not the case that the Government have simply outsourced the hardest decisions on social care cuts to the hardest-pressed local authorities to ensure that councils get the blame, not the Government, and that ultimately it is the NHS that suffers?

[David Mowat]

As I said earlier, we agree that the social care system is under pressure, but we also make the point that there is a massive disparity between the performance of different parts of that system. For example, Manchester, the hon. Gentleman’s own patch, has a DTOC performance seven to eight times worse, per 10,000 patients, than Salford, in spite of the 15% increase in its budget this year.