Laura Smith
Main Page: Laura Smith (Labour - Crewe and Nantwich)Department Debates - View all Laura Smith's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Laura Smith (Crewe and Nantwich) (Lab)
It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green).
Four weeks ago today, one of my constituents from the village of Hough attended Parliament to speak at Age UK’s parliamentary reception. We meet some people in life whom we will never forget. Joyce Yoxall is one of those people. Those who came to the event will remember her harrowing account of life as an unpaid carer. I was as moved then as I was when I first visited Joyce at her home to discuss the problems she is having with our social care system. Joyce’s husband David suffered a stroke in 2014. Since then, she has been forced to stop the care that David should be entitled to because of its high cost and poor quality. She talked about crippling care costs and how she felt she had been “let down”. I had to fight back the tears as she spoke about being mentally and physically exhausted, and how she dare not think of the year ahead.
Joyce has literally become the face of hundreds of thousands of people—and maybe more—who are in a similar situation by featuring on the front cover of Age UK’s aptly named report, “Why call it care when nobody cares?” The report is the result of 127 interviews regarding the quality of social care that people have experienced. I encourage anybody who has not read the report to do so.
The reason I started by talking about Joyce and David is that I want to remind everybody of the heartbreaking human reality behind the statistics I will refer to later. Let us start by reminding ourselves why those like Joyce might feel let down. As has been mentioned, a growing and ageing population is placing ever more demand on the social care sector, but that should not come as a surprise to anybody who has been living in the real world for at least some of the time in the past few decades.
Almost eight years ago, the Dilnot commission was set up by David Cameron’s coalition Government, tasked with making recommendations for changes to the funding of care. It published its recommendations in 2011, including a more generous means-testing threshold and a cap on care costs. That sounded promising, but after another general election the Government announced that the measures would be delayed until April 2020 and, at around the same time, closed the independent living fund. Then the Government promised to publish a Green Paper in the summer of 2017, but along came yet another general election, during which the current Prime Minister threatened to introduce a dementia tax.
Since then, we have had an autumn Budget in which the Chancellor failed even to mention social care, let alone provide adequate funding. We have seen the Department for Health and Social Care’s single departmental plan, which failed to mention the social care workforce. More recently, we had the spring statement, and still there is no lifeline for those with care needs or their families or carers.
We know that at some point, hopefully before the summer recess, the Government will publish their Green Paper on social care for older people, but we do not yet know when any proposals will be implemented after the consultation. To make matters worse, the Green Paper will not cover care for younger adults, which accounts for almost half of all council spending on adult social care.
Laura Smith
No.
There has been one missed opportunity after another—delay, delay, delay. Meanwhile, local councils, which are responsible for delivering social care, are seeing their budgets slashed, and one care home after another is placed in special measures or forced to close. What is the result? Research published recently by BMJ Open links cuts to adult social care and health spending to nearly 120,000 excess deaths in England since 2010.
The Care Act 2014 has been about as useful as a chocolate fireguard against a backdrop of inadequate funding and insufficient resources. The legislation has done nothing to protect the 1.2 million older people whose care needs are not being met. Our system clearly places more emphasis on councils setting balanced budgets to an ever-reducing bottom line than it does on making sure that all its residents’ care needs are met.
Laura Smith
No.
Cuts have consequences: I refer to my constituent’s words—that she
“dare not think of the year ahead.”
I do not blame my constituents for having little faith. The past eight years have been nothing but empty promises and never-ending cuts. Fully integrated health and social care would be a good start, but that does not go nearly far enough. We need a whole new approach to disability and ageing based on a commitment to the social model of disability that permeates every aspect of Government.
For example, our social care system needs to be aligned with an appropriate welfare policy and housing strategy, so that we remove as many barriers to disabled people as possible. Access to services should be on the basis of need and not affordability. I wholeheartedly agree that pumping more money into a broken system is no long-term solution.
Laura Smith
I have waited a long time to speak and I am going to carry on.
We need to stop viewing social care as a cost or a burden and instead see it as a wealth creator. Penny-pinching has proved to be a false economy when it comes to social care. It undermines the ability to take preventive action that not only is morally and ethically the right thing to do, but saves money in the long run by reducing the demand on our NHS. We also need to stop neglecting our 1.5 million workers in social care and build a more highly skilled and better-paid workforce. Finally, we need to address the failings of privatised adult social care, as outlined in the 2016 report by the Centre for Health and the Public Interest. Without any real debate, market values have penetrated areas where they do not belong and social care is perhaps the worst example of this. We cannot keep burying our heads in the sand and letting the crisis escalate.
There is no excuse for the Government’s inaction. The CQC warned us last year that social care was reaching a “tipping point”. This was after the Prime Minister had herself acknowledged that our system is broken. This cruel, callous Conservative Government have turned their back on older people and disabled people up and down this country. They have also repeatedly let down the social care workforce and the invisible army of unpaid carers.
Laura Smith
No.
We need a Government who put people before profits. Until then, I fear that we will be left with the same fragmented, failing system that is letting our constituents down daily.