Oral Answers to Questions

Mike Gapes Excerpts

Tuesday 8th May 2018 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

1. What steps he is taking to improve access to social care for people living with unmet social care needs.

[The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Mr Jeremy Hunt)]

The health and social care systems are inextricably linked, which is why we need to improve access to the social care system, and we will be setting out plans to do so in a Green Paper.

[Mike Gapes]

Age UK says that 1.2 million older people have unmet social care needs. Is it not time that we thought about integration in a practical way, and where we have acute hospitals with land next to them, such as King George Hospital in my constituency, we start to build sheltered accommodation or intermediate care on those sites so that people can easily be transferred into and out of the beds, freeing them up for other people who need them?

[Mr Hunt]

That is a wise suggestion, and it is exactly the direction of our thinking in the social care Green Paper, which will have a significant chapter on housing. Integration is not just about integrating health and social care; it is also about other services offered by local authorities. I commend, too, the hon. Gentleman’s local authority of Redbridge: it is No. 1 in the country for user satisfaction with the social care system and No. 4 for carer satisfaction.