Local Government Funding
Debate between Liz Kendall and Chris Davies(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Liz Kendall
My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. I will come to the social care precept. These problems will not go away. In fact, they will get far worse. Far from what the Government would like us to believe, there is a growing gap in funding for social care, which will have dire consequences for elderly and disabled people, their families and the NHS.
Chris Davies (Brecon and Radnorshire) (Con)
I thank the hon. Lady for bringing this debate forward. I remind her that in areas such as mine, which is run by her party in a devolved Administration, we are suffering great difficulties with local authority handouts. My local authority is suffering a 4.1% cut and delivering rural services exactly as she was describing. The cost of delivering those services to rural areas has doubled, if not trebled. That massive problem has been delivered by the hon. Lady’s Administration in my area.
Liz Kendall
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I know where I believe responsibility lies. It lies with the current Government. They say more money for social care will be provided, first, through the better care programme, although this money is not what it seems and is arriving far too late, when the sector is already in crisis. There will be no increase in better care programme money until 2017 and even then there will be only £105 million extra. The full additional £1.5 billion that the Government said social care is getting will not be available until 2020.
That will not all be new funding, because £800 million of it is supposed to come from savings in the new homes budget. Due to the way the money is distributed, a handful of councils will receive no additional better care programme cash and others will lose more in their new homes bonus than they gain. It is completely unclear whether the full £1.5 billion extra in the better care programme will still be allocated if the Government do not achieve the saving in the new homes bonus.
New powers to raise council tax by up to 2% to spend on social care—my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) referred to this—were announced in the spending review, but they will be nowhere near enough to fill the gap in social care funding.