Social Care Funding

Debate between Vince Cable and Kevin Hollinrake

Tuesday 1st October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered social care funding.

I should like to introduce a discussion on the funding of social care and narrow that to adult social care and the specific areas covered in the admirable Library briefing around the Green Paper in its absence.

It is a relief to debate something that is not about Brexit, although there is probably some indirect connection. Attempts have been made to blame the delays on Brexit, but the Secretary of State was candid enough to acknowledge that deep-seated disagreements going back 20 years explain why we are at an impasse on the basic principles.

There are a couple of contradictions or paradoxes that we must try to unravel. We all say that the only way forward is to have an all-party consensus, but at the same time the issue is increasingly weaponised. We all say that this is an incredibly urgent problem, but it stays for longer and longer in the long grass. Until we get to the root of those problems, we are not going to make any headway.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Sir Vince Cable]

Will the hon. Gentleman wait a moment? I will happily take interventions in a few minutes.

At the root of this—and trying to be generous to all parties—is a lot of public misunderstanding. This is a complex subject. To take just one point, half of the adult social care budget is not about old people; it is for younger adults. The public fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the means test—most people do not realise it exists until they encounter it. Consequently, people are frightened when they see proposals that are characterised on one side as a death tax and on the other as a dementia tax, apparently unaware that we have a death tax and a dementia tax now.

I cannot in my short contribution solve such a fundamentally difficult problem that has been going on so long, but we need to try to disentangle issues that are fundamentally different. My primary concern is social care—how we support people in the community so they can function with a proper life, preferably at home, outside of hospital.

A totally different set of problems—wealth, property and inheritance—leads to a lot of the emotional angst caused by what is sometimes called catastrophe risk: people landed with financial obligations as a result of having long-term personal care and the expense of £50,000 a year or whatever in a residential home. However, that is about wealth, distribution and assets. It has nothing to do with health and we have to try to separate the two.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I am also grateful for the opportunity to discuss this matter on a cross-party basis. He mentioned a cross-party consensus earlier. Is he aware of last year’s joint report by the Health and Social Care Committee and the Communities and Local Government Committee on the future funding of social care? That report came to a cross-party consensus on how we can move forward, and one of the solutions was a social care premium.

[Sir Vince Cable]

Yes, there is a lot of joint thinking. We have the joint House of Commons Committees, and my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), as Chair, was critically involved in that. There is also a very good piece of work by the House of Lords, and the considerable brains of Lord Lawson and Lord Darling contributed to a cross-party consensus. A lot of think-tanking is going on in the vacuum created by the Government’s non-publication. There is no shortage of ideas, but we need to be clear what the problem is—and it is a very serious one.

Finance (No. 3) Bill

Debate between Vince Cable and Kevin Hollinrake

2nd reading: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Monday 12th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Vince Cable]

Yes. All the evidence we have shows that net migration has had a positive effect not only on the economy, in per capita terms, but on Government revenue because, by and large, these are young people who work and pay tax revenue to the Government. I totally share the hon. Lady’s concerns about future immigration legislation.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The right hon. Gentleman spoke earlier about cross-party consensus on social care. Is he aware of the joint report of the Health and Social Care Committee and the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee? One of its recommendations was for a social care premium—social insurance of the type used in Germany—to solve this problem. There are no Liberal Democrats on those Committees but will his party nevertheless support such a cross-party approach?

[Sir Vince Cable]

That was at the heart of the Dilnot proposals that Lib Dem Ministers sponsored and supported in government. If that is the idea, we do not have any problem.

On the income tax changes, and particularly the lifting of the higher-rate threshold at a cost of about £1.3 billion, I certainly do not regard people on £50,000 a year as rich—they have a lower income than we do, among other things—and, in an ideal world in which there was plenty of tax revenue and the economy was booming, lifting the threshold would be perfectly reasonable, but given other priorities it is a bad choice. As it happens, that £1.3 billion is equal to the shortfall between the amount of money the previous Chancellor took from universal credit two years ago and the amount that was reinstated this year. Filling that shortfall would be a much better use of the funding.