May hints Conservative manifesto will attempt to address social care crisis
Theresa May has hinted that the Conservative general election manifesto will attempt to address the looming social care crisis.
The Prime Minister said the country needed to “stop ducking the issue” when she was asked what her manifesto would do to address the issue on a visit to Wales yesterday. She pledged a “long-term solution”
to the crisis but said the Government was taking transitional measures.
Mr May said: “We are and have been already working on a long-term solution and that’s what we need in this country, we need to stop ducking the issue we need to ensure we’ve got that long-term solution for a sustainable future for social care.”
The PM claimed the Government had put more money into social care as a “short-term” response, and that in the medium term it had allowed councils to increase their council tax to fund the service.
In fact, councils face a £2.6bn shortfall for social care funding that council tax rises will not be able to cover, according to research by the cross-party Local Government Association released in February. One in 10 councils cut their spending on social care by more than a quarter in the past six years, according to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine has warned that tens of thousand of “excess deaths” are year could be linked to the poor state of health and social care budgets.
Labours says it wants to integrate health and social care to deliver a national care service in the same vein as the NHS.