‘No plans to deal with care crisis’

HALTON MP Derek Twigg has accused the Government of having ‘no strategy’ to deal with a crisis in social care funding.

Mr Twigg told Jeremy Hunt, Secretary Of State For Health, that problems in the sector were not confined to winter but were all year round.

He said the amount of cash raised by allowing local authorities to raise precepts on council tax for social care would be ‘not enough’.

The Halton MP, who has raised the issue of social care funding on repeated occasions in the House Of Commons in recent months, asked Mr Hunt whether he thought anyone inside or outside the Department Of Health thought there was a strategy.

Mr Hunt said Communities Secretary Sajid Javid had unveiled a package of £900m to be spent over the next two years and added that the Government was ‘working hard’ to produce a long-term sustainable solution.

The Health Secretary also urged Mr Twigg to heed comments from the Prime Minister the previous week, when Theresa May had said she recognised the ‘pressures on social care’.

Mrs May, Conservative, had said that billions of pounds extra will have been pumped into the sector via the Better Care Fund by the end of this Parliament.

Her comments came as leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, accused the Government of cutting £4.6bn from the care budget in 2010-15.