Social Care Funding: Intergenerational Impact

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very happy to follow that intervention. I recognise its accuracy and pointedness, but I cannot feel—yet anyway —that this is an either/or, although certainly the question of poverty runs through our society and needs to be addressed radically. However, “intergenerational” clearly means a lot more to me than it does to the noble Lord who preceded me. It raises a lot of questions that demand to be answered. I am most grateful for the report from the committee, which I found very helpful. I hope that the Minister can reassure all of us that it has been taken into consideration by the Government in reaching their conclusions.

Knowing that experts in this field were speaking in this debate, I decided to do something a little different. I had a little seminar with two young people, aged about 20, who are not far from entering the jobs market and are quite intelligent. They wanted to discuss how they face the future that is being posited by these rises in national insurance to pay for social care. Of course, I was the third participant in that seminar—the baby boomer, locked up three times in a prison cell and enjoying benefits that seem to be unchallengeable.

It was interesting that the two young men, Tim and Oliver, picked on a sentence that said, “We would argue that fully funded free social care through income tax or national insurance contributions in the near future, before a fund to help pay for it has been established, fails to meet the test of intergenerational fairness because the burden for paying for social care would then fall only on the working-age population, while retired people would contribute nothing.” A little later, another sentence they picked up on was: “We would argue that older people should also make a contribution to the cost of social care”—of course, we must all agree with this.

From other sources, they plucked out comments like: the proposals currently before us would lead to

“the breakdown of families and deter companies from hiring new staff and increasing wages”.

That source also quoted another leading figure as saying that the proposals would worsen social care by making private providers pay more national insurance. Finally, there was a newspaper editorial that said:

“Coming after a year of lockdown, with its catastrophic economic and psychological impact, to inflict yet more pain on the public is senseless and intolerable.


It said that the NHS has an intolerable backlog to clear and that

“We were … promised a once-in-a-generation fix of social care, but the sum earmarked … is paltry”.


Before the Minister comes to the conclusion that this is another rant from the Labour Party Benches, I will say that this was in fact from the Tory chair of the Local Government Association. This is the first time in my entire life that I have quoted from an editorial in the Daily Telegraph—from last Sunday. I hope that the Minister will answer these points seriously.