Social Care

Rachel Maclean Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Barbara Keeley]

I am obviously coming to the end of my speech, but I recommend that the hon. Gentleman, if he is interested, read a number of documents. The Labour Government produced a White Paper for a national care service; it is still available, and I advise him to look at it. Given everything I have said about carers in this speech, there is no way that we would not include them as an important part of our proposals, but the burden should not just be dumped on them. Carers should be partners in care, and they should be supported so that they have a life of their own. It is said that the only numbers put on the Conservative party’s proposals for a dementia tax in its manifesto were the page numbers. The Labour party has produced the document I have here—“Funding Britain’s Future”—and a fully costed manifesto. If the hon. Gentleman has a bit more time for reading, I advise him to go to our manifesto and to look at how we laid out the options. We laid them out; we did not get into a mess, as the Conservative party did, and try to change things after four days. We will take this issue forward; we will not kick it into the long grass, as the Conservative party is trying to do.

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Barbara Keeley]

No, I am just going to finish.

Our motion asks for action to make sure the care sector gets the urgent funding it needs to prevent collapse. It would also ensure that hard-pressed councils are not penalised for failing to meet unrealistic targets for delayed transfers of care.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the contributions from Members on both sides of the House today in this extremely important debate. I have personal experience of this, as my 80-year-old mother is in the early stages of dementia. She lives in Cumbria, many hundreds of miles from this place, and I have often had to run from these Benches to take phone calls from the local authority services in the past few weeks. I have seen for myself the experience that many of our constituents and their families are going through. I pay tribute to those who are at the sharp end; I have seen some fantastic examples of caring people in Cumbria and in my constituency. So I commend the Prime Minister and the Government for seizing this difficult and challenging issue. She was brave enough to talk about something that has been an issue for many, many years. Opposition Members have been very negative and critical of us. They are right to criticise our election campaign—not everything was right in it, and there are problems now—but I welcome the calls to work together. I really want to see us work together across this House to deal with this issue.

I make one plea to Opposition Members: please do not talk about a dementia tax, as there is no such thing. When I spoke to people in my constituency, I found that they were very concerned about the challenges that face their families and people in their communities, and this language was terrifying to them. It obscured the fact that care is not free now. Currently, people are being forced to sell their homes and they do face difficult challenges. We are right to have this debate, but please let us not do it in a way that frightens people who are vulnerable already.

We do face some big challenges and it is very important that we get the health and social care sector working together. I welcome the fact that in Redditch £100 million is being put into our accident and emergency in the Alex and we have a new elderly and frail unit, which helps to speed up the process of people leaving hospital when they need to go. I wanted to make a number of points, but time is short, so let me say that it is right to look at a balance of solutions.

I welcome what the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) said about people who are wealthy and can contribute. We need to consider how can we have a grown-up, intelligent and mature debate about that, because we are facing a large demand on the public purse to fund this in the next few years. The Labour party put forward a manifesto in 1997 to deal with this issue, but it was not resolved. We have grasped the nettle. I thank our Front-Bench team for bringing this forward. Let us have the consultation and deal with this for our constituents.