NHS and Adult Social Care

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Wednesday 5th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I thank the noble Lord for that. I did not want to get ahead of myself but I thank him and all members of the committee for their work in putting together this document. I appreciate that it is an incredibly thorough and important piece of work, and I am also grateful to have received an embargoed copy of it yesterday. I will of course look carefully at all the recommendations and respond properly in due course. I am sure that we will also have an opportunity for a longer debate.

The noble Lord specifically asked about social care, and I completely agree with the priority attached to it in the report. He will know that the Government have committed more money in the short term to support social care, with £2 billion more having been announced at the Budget. But I know that his emphasis and the emphasis of his committee was on long-term reform. He is quite right to point out that the Green Paper is a very important opportunity to take a broad perspective and to put the system on a sustainable long-term footing.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I too commend the noble Lord and his committee for a thorough report, which I endorse and on which I hope we can have a full debate in due course. On the future of long-term care, the noble Lord will know that before the 2010 election Andy Burnham, as Secretary of State for Health, made some very striking proposals for its funding. I wonder whether the Minister regrets that David Cameron and other Conservative leaders at the time condemned this as a “death tax” and put back the search for consensus on the funding of social care for many, many years.

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

The so-called “death tax”, to use the noble Lord’s words—