It’s time to put a penny on income tax for social care

Would you like to eat your dinner at 3.30pm? What’s that you say? Oh. Tough, because that’s when you’re getting it. You may be lying around all day being old and frail, but the clock’s ticking on the social care meter, and it’s literally now or never.

Sit up. Eat up. And if you hurry, I might just have a couple of moments to help you get up and go to the loo. I can wash you some time next week…

That’s not exactly the silver surfer vision of retirement is it? No one dreams of being bed-bound, lonely and in the shambolic care of a crumbling system where carers often fail to turn up and, if they do, don’t have the time for anything but a flying visit and the most cursory of care.

Insulin injections missed, disabled people left in their own body waste; the new Healthwatch England report is just the latest front-line dispatch, another wretched accretion of evidence that social care is unfit for purpose. But what in God’s name will it take for our elected representatives to do more than engage in fatuous “lessons-will-be-learned” handwringing after each new indignity is highlighted, and take action?

If we’re lucky, we will all of us grow old. If we are unlucky, we will be infirm and unwanted. I have friends without children who lie awake at night wondering who will install the secret cameras in their care homes should they eventually find themselves at the mercy of the state.

Last February, an Age UK report concluded that the English social care system for the elderly faces “complete collapse” in the worst-affected areas.

Currently, 1.2million people aged 65 and older don’t receive the support they need to dress, eat and wash, a figure that has risen by a shocking 50 per cent since 2010.

Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, has pledged £2billion over three years to ease the crisis. It’s not enough: a social care penny on income tax would not harm the economy. Stuff ideology. This is about people, not politics, and time is running out.