Social Care Funding

Debate between Karin Smyth and Liz Kendall

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

This year is the 70th anniversary of the NHS. It is also the 70th anniversary of our social care system, but that has received far too little attention to date. It is not getting any of the national celebrations—the birthday cakes and cards—and certainly none of the £20 billion birthday present that the NHS received from the Prime Minister.

Yet social care is more important than ever before. A quarter of older people now need help with daily living—getting up, washed, dressed and fed. More adults with physical and learning disabilities need substantial packages of support. There are 1 million paid care workers and 6.5 million unpaid carers. Yet despite the fact that this touches so many people’s lives and that there is an increasing demand, we have no sense from the Government of the reality of the situation. There has been a 10% cut in real terms in social care spending, with 400,000 fewer people getting any kind of help and support. A third of carers have to give up their job or reduce their hours to look after their loved ones, and a quarter of the paid care workforce leaves every single year. There is nothing from Government Front Benchers—no sense of the urgency of the challenge we are facing.

We cannot solve this problem without substantial extra funding. The Health Foundation says that we need £6 billion just to maintain the current inadequate system. It is not good enough.

Over the last 20 years, we have had 12 Green and White Papers and five independent commissions, but we have not solved this problem, and we need to understand why. Most people think that they are not going to end up needing this support. When they end up needing it, they do not realise that many of them will have to pay. They think the current system is unfair, but when radical proposals have been put forward for how to fund the system, they believe that those are unfair too.

This issue has been a political football. Labour was accused of imposing a death tax, and the Tories were accused of imposing a dementia tax—but it is not the politicians who suffer; it is the people who use the services and their carers. We cannot go on like this any longer.

I believe that one of the reasons this issue has not been solved is that much of it is about low-paid women who work in people’s homes and care homes invisibly. Caring is not valued, and we have to change that.

[Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech and she is an expert in this area. She is right; the language we have heard today is all about the challenges and the costs. This is an infrastructure issue, and it needs to be treated as such. Because women lead this workforce, it is not considered an infrastructure issue, and if we did that and changed the language around this, we would have a completely different debate. Does she agree?