Social Care

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Wednesday 25th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

I will make three brief points. The cuts we have seen to social care because of the huge reductions in local council funding are not just morally questionable but economically illiterate. Hundreds of thousands fewer people are now getting publicly funded social care, which is there to help frail, vulnerable people just to get out of bed and dressed, fed and washed—things we all take for granted. Those who still get publicly funded support are seeing it reduced, with shorter visits than they desperately need. The result is increasing numbers of elderly people going into hospital and getting stuck when they do not need to be there, which is terrible for them and costs the taxpayer far more.

As the shadow Care Minister said, this has a huge impact on unpaid family carers. One in four unpaid carers has not had a single day off caring for five years. Not a single day in five years! Think of the strain that puts on their physical and mental health. One in three unpaid family carers in work has had to give up their job or reduce their hours, so their income goes down, they end up claiming more in benefits and their employer loses their skills. There would be an outcry if that happened in any other area of the workforce.

I am afraid that the Government still do not get it. They are still failing to look properly at the NHS and social care together. It is astonishing that we have a separate Green Paper on social care, and doubly astonishing that the Green Paper focuses only on older people and not the hundreds of thousands of disabled people. We have to look at them together, and I urge the Minister to think again about the Government’s approach.

That leads me to my third point, which is about the solution. We need an urgent and immediate injection of cash into social care and the NHS. We simply cannot put the services, patients, carers and families through this all again next winter. We also need a bold 10-year strategy for investment and reform.

The NHS and social care will always be political issues, and rightly so—they are things we deeply care about—but we need a cross-party approach on future funding, especially of social care, not just because any party that comes up with a bold proposal risks being obliterated by its political opponents, but because we desperately need a system that will last for the long term, not for the politicians but for the people who use and work in those services.

I urge the Government to heed the calls from more than 100 MPs on both sides of the House for a short parliamentary commission on a long-term strategy, which would report within a year. I also hope the Government will consider the 10 principles of long-term funding for the NHS and social care put forward by myself, the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) and the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles). We agree that the NHS must remain a universal tax-funded service, available free at the point of delivery, based on need, not ability to pay. We agree that spending on the NHS and social care must increase by substantially more than inflation over the next 20 years because of our ageing population, new treatments and technologies, and the need to achieve genuine equality of access to treatment for people with mental ill health. We believe that people are more likely to be willing to pay more for the NHS and social care if they can be certain that additional resources are dedicated to that end and cannot be diverted into other Government programmes—in other words, there should be hypo- thecation. We believe that increases in funding must be progressive and fair between the generations, with higher earners, the self-employed and better-off pensioners making a fair contribution to future funding. We also believe that every five years there should be an independent assessment, carried out by the Office for Budget Responsibility or a separate health-focused body, to look at the resources needed to run the NHS and social care in future, which Parliament will then debate and decide on.

These are tough issues, no one is denying it, but we have to join up the services, and we need in this year, the 70th anniversary of the NHS, to get a future funding settlement. If we were creating the NHS today, it would be a national health and care service. It must be fair, it must be progressive and it must last for future generations. I urge the Government to act.