Social Care

Lord Elystan-Morgan Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I will certainly be happy to do that. I absolutely endorse the ultimate finding of that report about the valuable contribution that the arts have to make. I shall investigate whether a letter has perhaps gone astray.

[Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB)]

Have Her Majesty’s Government given any thought to a far-off, divine event, by which I mean the total merger of the services aspect of social services with the NHS, thus cancelling out a great deal of imperial rivalry between the two bodies? At a personal level, such rivalry often means a whole platoon of people beating a path to a patient’s door, unco-ordinated with each other and duplicating each other’s services.

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I think that everyone in this House endorses the idea that health and social care should be better integrated. That statement is easy to make but difficult to achieve, as I think we would all agree, not least because the funding bases are very different. The NHS is taxpayer funded and free at the point of use; social care is funded on a different basis. That is one of the factors, as well as the bodies responsible for commissioning and so on. A practical way forward is to seek integration at a local level. That is happening now, for example, in Greater Manchester, which has powers over both services and is looking to integrate, and it lies at the heart of NHS England’s five-year forward view, which is about bringing services together in 44 areas, known as STP areas, to provide that level of integration. Patients do not want to have to flit through different bodies all the time. They want a sense that there is one service looking after them throughout their needs.