Social Care Funding

Debate between Karen Lee and Vince Cable

Tuesday 1st October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sir Vince Cable]

I will come to that point later and to the heart of what I understand to be the Labour proposal—on free personal care—in not too polemical a way. It presents opportunities but also serious problems.

We have the growth in demand, the hidden costs, and the burden on local authorities. It is easy to score political points, and I will put my hand up immediately: after the financial crisis I was part of the Government and we cut—in real terms—per capita spending in this area by about 11%. It did not start then. The number of people with so-called moderate needs who were excluded in the previous five years rose from 50% to 75%. It is an old problem as well as a new one, and we are all faced with the challenge of how to finance local authorities. If local authorities are underfunded, we all know the problem gets passed back to hospitals in delayed discharge.

There is the problem of the labour force. It is horrendous. Until I saw the figures, I had not realised just how bad it is. There is an annual turnover of 450,000 care workers for a mixture of reasons, a lot of it to do with pay and conditions. We currently have 100,000 vacancies, and there is the potential for stricter immigration controls, which would create even more vacancies and make them even more difficult to manage. The business model for the companies involved, partly in residential care but also in domiciliary care, is just not viable; as I understand it, four of the leading providers are now up for sale and one is in administration.

The problem, as we all recognise from our constituencies, is that there is a two-tier system: on the one hand, luxurious and comfortable homes for those who do not need to worry about money, but on the other crumbling homes with minimal standards, overseas workers on minimum pay, and a nasty smell of urine—we have all seen them. An intermediate level of care that is attractive and affordable is simply not available.

Those are the problems, as I think we all recognise, but the question is: what can be done? As has been mentioned, a wide variety of brains in and outside this place have been contributing and thinking about it; one of the unintended benefits of the Government’s delay has been that others have filled the vacuum with ideas. The most useful ideas that I encountered seemed to be from organisations such as the Health Foundation and the King’s Fund, which have no political axe to grind that I am aware of. They suggest that rather than trying to deal with all these complicated problems together, we should deal with them in sequence, starting with those that are more manageable. Essentially, they suggest that there are four stages to dealing with them, which I will briefly canter through.

First, we should identify what we need to do simply to stabilise the present position, unsatisfactory though it is, because there is a real danger of going even further backwards as a result of lack of resource. The King’s Fund identifies a need for an extra £1.5 billion by 2021 and £6 billion by 2030 simply to keep the system at its present level, unsatisfactory though it is. I hope we can all agree that that is the absolute minimum that we should aim for.

The second level up is improvement. As the King’s Fund identifies it, that means going back to the standards that prevailed in 2009-10, although they were unsatisfactory even then, and filling in some of the holes in availability of social care. It costs that at approximately £8 billion a year, rising to £10 billion after five years—a significant sum. My party, including colleagues present, has come with up with one suggestion: creating a ring-fenced fund based on a penny in every pound of income tax. That would raise £6.5 billion, which would get us most of the way there. I do not want to be doctrinaire about the best way of doing this, but I hope that there can be some understanding that that contribution, which is very limited in terms of public funding, could get us back to a more acceptable standard. People have different views about which taxes we should use and how we should ring-fence the money, but that seems to me to be the minimum level of ambition—and it could happen without legislation if the parties agreed that we should proceed in that way.

We then get on to the more difficult level, which relates to charging. One thing that has come through to me from reading the various think-tank reports is the growing interest in the idea of free personal care in the Scottish model. I confess that I have always been sceptical about it—I have the traditional economist’s scepticism of free things—but its proponents note two practical attractions that have nothing to do with ideology or party thinking: it aligns social care and healthcare, if we are going to integrate the two systems, and it brings in a lot of people who are currently excluded from social care provision, so that they are more likely to stay at home rather than going into hospital. It has potential benefits as well as costs.

[Karen Lee (Lincoln) (Lab)]

I am an ex-nurse. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is right to offset the costs of social care against what we would save the NHS? I regularly had eight patients, and probably three of them would be medically fit for discharge and did not want to sit in a bed, although they had to do so. When we consider the cost, we must also balance that issue.