Queen’s Speech

Lord Warner Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, nearly six hours into this debate I thought I would give us a change of subject. I was reliably informed by the Chief Whip’s Office that if I wanted to talk about the Care Bill and its implications for local government, I should speak today. In doing so, I declare my interests both as a member of the Commission on Funding of Care and Support, whose recommendations the Bill largely implements, and as a member of the Joint Select Committee that considered the draft Bill. However, before turning to that Bill I want to make a few observations on youth unemployment.

It is rare for me to quote approvingly remarks made by the late Lady Thatcher. However, nearly 30 years ago she said something that was true then and remains true today. She said:

“Young people ought not to be idle. It is very bad for them”.

She might have added that it is also bad for society, but that was not a word that easily passed her lips.

As the founding chair of the Youth Justice Board, set up after the 1997 election, I dealt with some of the consequences of unemployed, untrained and uneducated young men ending up in the criminal justice system. I am not going to lay all the blame on the current Government, because youth unemployment is a global problem. OECD figures suggest that 26 million 15 to 24 year-olds in developed countries are not in employment, education or training. Our performance in the UK is better than some but it is certainly not as good as it ought to be, with 1 million young people unemployed. Unless we improve the way that we tackle this problem, we will be storing up trouble not just for those young people but for ourselves.

Much current social policy is preoccupied with the demography of an ageing society. This is understandable and my noble friend Lord Filkin chaired a committee of your Lordships’ House which produced an excellent report on our lack of preparedness for the service demands of an ageing society. However, one of the social requirements of that ageing society is a well trained and educated workforce that is generating wealth—not a growing number of sullen, unemployed malcontents.

As we grapple with the needs of an ageing society through worthwhile measures such as the Care Bill, we also must ensure that we set aside sufficient resources to educate, train and employ our young people, and not waste their talents. That means striking a better balance than we have now in our priorities for public expenditure between the young and the elderly. That may be an unfashionable thing to say but, as one of the elderly, I think I am entitled to say it.

All the parties need to stop oversubsidising the well-off elderly with winter fuel allowances, free travel passes and free TV licences. I am sorry but on this I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who is not in his place. If tough decision-making is the political mantra of today, why not start by at least taxing those entitlements or partially withdrawing them, and removing exemption from national insurance contributions for those who work after retirement age? Will the Minister comment on those issues in her response, even if it gets her into a bit of trouble with No. 10?

Let me turn now to the Care Bill. The coalition Government are to be congratulated on grasping the nettle of both reforming social care law, as recommended by the Law Commission, and on accepting the thrust of the proposals in the Dilnot commission’s report. Here, I pay tribute to Paul Burstow and Norman Lamb for tenaciously pursuing reform despite Treasury obstacles. I do not intend today to comment on the detail of the Bill and will save those comments for the Bill’s Second Reading next week.

However, I want to comment on social care funding and the problems that it presents in implementing the Bill’s good intentions, particularly on some of the implications of that parlous state of funding for the NHS. Adult social care is now consuming more and more of local government’s budgets and is set on a course to consume virtually all of it in a couple of decades. Yet, strangely, the latest survey from the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services shows that by next April local councils will have stripped out £2.7 billion—I repeat, billion, not million—from adult social care services since 2010. That is equivalent to 20% of their budget for care at a time when demand for their services is rising considerably. Domiciliary care is being paid for at below the minimum wage by some councils and some care homes are relying on subsidies from self-funders because councils simply are not paying the true cost of providing decent care.

The transfer of £850 million to councils from the NHS this year does no more than cover the budget reductions that councils are making. One-third of the directors of ADASS consider that many people who in the past would have qualified for help will no longer get it as a result of the existing tightening of eligibility criteria. On present plans, that rises to half of directors in two years’ time when the Care Bill will be implemented. The idea that this Care Bill can be implemented without a significant increase in the service and administrative budgets for adult social care is pure fantasy. However, let me emphasise that I am not suggesting an increase in public expenditure, as I shall explain.

The Dilnot commission made clear that its proposals would do nothing to bring up to speed the existing shortfall in funding of adult social care. On the most conservative estimate I suggest that the shortfall is somewhere in excess of £1.2 billion a year. Demography is worsening these matters by about 3% a year—another half a billion pounds a year. The consequences of this social care funding crisis for the NHS are already clear to see in the overcrowded medical wards of acute hospitals. Experts acknowledge that those wards have around a quarter to a third of patients who simply should not be there. The great majority of those people are aged 80 and older. This is both bad for the patients and extremely costly for the taxpayer. The present way in which we are caring for elderly patients in some of our hospitals and care homes is simply another Mid Staffordshire waiting to happen.

What we need now is a much clearer policy across the political parties of resource transfer from the £110 billion a year NHS budget to fund adult social care properly, where the taxpayers’ money would be better spent. Can the Minister tell the House what further plans the Government have to transfer resources from the NHS to social care this year and next to make good the budget shortfall before implementation of the Care Bill starts?

We have heard a lot today about Europe. Whether we leave or stay in Europe, we will still have to tackle these and the many other domestic problems that have been identified today. Endless banging on about EU membership seems to many of us a self-indulgent political diversion from resolving some of the difficult problems in our own back yard.