Health, Social Care and Security

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

It is good to be back.

It was 10 minutes past 8 in the evening on Friday 19 May when I realised the election campaign was going to get a whole lot more interesting than I thought it would be when it was called. I was sitting in a room in a public school outside Guildford, taking part in BBC Radio 4’s “Any Questions?” programme. The first question from the audience was whether the Government were taking the support of pensioners for granted with the pronouncements they had made a few days earlier on the funding of pensions and social care. Listeners to the radio will not have heard this, of course, but in that room I could tell that the audience did not need to wait for the panel to pronounce before they made up their minds on that question. The sense of indignation and outrage was palpable. In that moment, I knew that if that was the feeling of those small “c” conservative voters in the heart of Tory Surrey, the electorate were most certainly on manoeuvres in this election and that the outcome would be a lot more unpredictable than any of us had imagined.

Of course, the policy of making people pay for their social care to the point of their own impoverishment was quickly qualified and taken off the table but, as we all know, perception is everything in politics, and the damage was done. That ill-fated policy was one of the reasons that a Government with a majority went into an election and lost it. We are promised in the Gracious Speech that there will be a review of social care and, presumably, its funding. I am concerned that the thinking behind that ill-fated policy is still alive and well on the Conservative Benches, and that it may yet come forward as ruminations continue on public policy in this area, so I will spend this brief time dismissing that thinking and saying that it should not form part of our thinking.

There is a perfectly coherent and legitimate point of view on the political right that says that the funding of public services should be transferred from the state to the individual. It is wrong and I disagree with it, but I understand the point of view. To my mind, that point of view is invalidated and becomes incoherent and unjust when we say that it will be applied only to people who contract debilitating and incurable diseases, because we are then talking about the epitome of double jeopardy. We are talking about people who have the misfortune to become ill. We would be saying that they will not only suffer the pain and worry of that, but that they will be forced to fund their own care to the point of losing their savings so that they and their families will become much poorer than they would otherwise be. That seems an outrageous suggestion, and that was what lay behind the indignation of the audience in that room.

We do not know which of us will fall ill and which of us will remain healthy. That is why every civilised society turns for answers to the concept of social insurance, where we all pay in with the hope that we will not need to draw down on the policy, but with the expectation that, if we need to, the care will be there and we will not have to pay for it ourselves by becoming poor. That principle must underpin any review of social care funding. People will throw their hands up, aghast at the potential cost. But the Scottish National party Government in Scotland, with support from other parties, have maintained for 10 years free personal care for the elderly. That service is provided for 77,000 older people in Scotland. To do that across the UK would perhaps cost £7 billion or £8 billion, which is a very large amount of money—1% of our gross national product—but that is the question we are presented with as this review continues.