Queen’s Speech

Lord Warner Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, let me start by saying that I welcome the Government’s decision to include in their legislative programme a Bill to reform and speed up adoption processes. That is the end of the good news. Most of my contribution will relate to adult social care—on which, given the urgency of the situation, the Government have seriously let people down. It is of course true that they have promised a draft Bill on care and support at some time during this Session. However, they have still not delivered their long-promised White Paper on reform of adult social care, and the draft Bill will not deal with the most crucial issue: funding social care. Perhaps the Minister will tell us a bit more in his reply about when we may expect the White Paper, what he anticipates will be in the draft Bill and when it is likely to appear to an anxious audience.

I turn now to why the Government have really let everyone down by not coming forward with a comprehensive Bill on social care that reforms both the system and its funding. Like my noble friend Lady Morgan, I find it extraordinary that the Government can find the time and space for a Bill to reform the House of Lords—a subject of marginal interest to most of the public—but cannot comprehensively reform social care. It is a system that is acknowledged across the parties and throughout the public to be broken, and it affects large numbers of elderly people and their families throughout the country. It is an extraordinary choice of priority.

Perhaps I may say gently to the Minister that it is also striking that he did not even mention in his remarks that there is a draft Bill on social care and support in the gracious Speech. Therein lies the nub of the problem—namely, that the crumbling social care system is something about which the Government do not wish to talk, particularly in terms of its underfunding. They did not create the problem and they deserve a great deal of credit for including the issue in the coalition agreement and setting up an independent commission. Here I declare my interest as a member of the three-person independent Dilnot Commission on Funding of Care and Support. When the commission was set up, we were asked to report by July 2011 so that the Government could produce, with all the silkiness of the Department of Health’s slick official machine, a White Paper in time for legislation in this Session. We did our bit and we delivered on time. Not only did we deliver our report on time, we delivered it in a form in which the proposals attracted the support of a wide range of stakeholders—from carers’ interests and voluntary organisations working in this field to the financial services sector.

Where are we now? No White Paper has yet appeared. A draft Bill is promised, but it will not deal with funding. The cross-party talks, with a lot of pressure from Labour, have been proceeding in a desultory fashion and with little progress made. The two key people who have opted out of this process are the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. Perhaps the Minister can disabuse us all in his reply, but my understanding is that the Chancellor has swept this issue into the next comprehensive spending review. We have a situation where the cross-party talks are going on at Health Secretary and shadow Health Secretary level while the guys who hold the key to progress in this area are doing something else.

In the mean time, things can only get worse for the state-funded sector, which is where things are really bad. No new financial products are coming along from the financial services sector to help people save for long-term care. People in that sector will not produce new products without some clear cross-party support and views on the future funding system. Investment in the private sector, particularly in new homes and services, is being deferred until there is certainty about what the funding system will look like.

Day by day, local authorities are tightening their criteria so that only the most critical people in need get services. Service quality deteriorates. We have seen a lot of recent scandals about long-term care of the elderly, but I do not think that we have seen anything yet. We are dealing with a sector that is very labour intensive and largely staffed by people at or even below the minimum wage. There is a deficit in the state-funded sector and we are at least £1 billion a year short of what is needed to provide a decent service—and that figure is rising. Anxiety and fear among the elderly population and their families is now widespread. Funding social care has become a ticking time bomb, not least because a financially challenged NHS picks up the tab for the social care casualties who end up occupying inappropriate and expensive hospital beds.

I do not propose to do a commercial for the Dilnot report, but the start-up costs of its proposals was 0.14% of GDP and less than 1% of the NHS annual budget. We are living through a time in which the current figure of 1.5 million people over 85 will double by 2030. That is why we need to tackle this issue, and it is a grave disappointment that the Government are failing to act. It is now for the Prime Minister and Chancellor to start getting engaged.