Health and Social Care

Steve Brine Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The simple reason that I gave earlier is that none of those measures raise anything like the funding that we need. I have explained that very clearly, and I think that colleagues understand it and I think the country understands it. People are very suspicious. They know that this country has been through an enormous fiscal impact from the pandemic. They know that the Government have put their arms round people and spent £407 billion. They would be very suspicious of a Government who pretend that they can get the NHS back on its feet without some kind of serious, responsible, fair, fiscal effort and that is what we are doing.

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for gripping this issue. We are not in Government to be afraid of doing anything for fear of offending anyone. I will study the plans that the PM has promised to set out and I thank him for them. On behalf of my constituents and their families trapped right now in the spiral of rising care costs and fast disappearing resources, may I urge him and the Health Secretary, as we develop the new system that he has promised, to consider those for whom this is an issue in the present and not just many years into the future.

[The Prime Minister]

I absolutely agree with what my hon. Friend has said. The tragedy of decades of failure to tackle this matter is that people are now facing these costs. What we are doing is investing—as we have done throughout the pandemic—about £6 billion, I think, in dealing with the immediate costs of social care to try to help people through this very difficult time. What this package offers is a way of developing a long-term solution, enabling, we hope, the private sector to come in and give people a long-term plan to fix the costs of their own social care, knowing that the Government will remove the risk of those catastrophic costs. That is the advantage of what we are doing today.