Social Care Funding

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Barbara Keeley]

Indeed. My hon. Friend makes a really good point. I noticed that the number of delayed transfers of care due to care packages has started to rise, even though it is not fully winter—[Interruption.] Yes, they have, over the last couple of months. The Care Quality Commission has said that in some parts of the country the social care system has now reached the tipping point that of warned of two years ago.

The response from the Secretary of State was to announce that £240 million would be given to councils to deliver packages of home care to people this winter. That is nowhere near what is needed. The social care funding gap is already over £1 billion this year and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) said, it will reach £2.5 billion by 2020 unless the Government intervene.

By my calculations, the Government’s offer will provide only three months’ of care packages for 70,000 people, so when the Secretary of State gets to his feet, will he tell us what will happen to people who need publicly funded home care when the money runs out? What plans do the Government have to provide care beyond the winter?

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

For some people, it is not possible to wait for money to be available. A third of people who are diagnosed with motor neurone disease will die within one year and over half will die within two years. A delay of a matter of weeks can alter someone’s pathway towards death. Does my hon. Friend agree that there is no time to delay?

[Barbara Keeley]

I very much agree. In recent months, I have met carers of people with MND and one becomes aware of how much time presses on them.

Our motion deals with social care funding, but this debate is really about people, such as the people my hon. Friend just referred to. It is about how society treats older and younger adults, how we should enable them to live independently and with dignity, and how this Government are badly letting them down. I will look today at the damage caused by Government inaction—damage to vulnerable people who rely on social care to live with dignity, damage to the lives of unpaid family carers who have had to step in to care for their friends and relatives, and damage to 1.4 million hard-working care staff, many of whom are so badly paid and so overworked that they cannot deliver the care that people need.