The whole nation owes campaigning Daily Mail and its readers a huge debt of gratitude
NOT for the first time, the Mail had it right. As the newspaper which has campaigned longest and most passionately for reform of the social care system, you and your readers deserve great credit.
Over many years, the news pages of the Mail have told the stories of those people who did not get the care they deserved or suffered catastrophic costs, or were forced to sell their homes.
You, rightly, also pointed to a practical solution in the form of the proposals put forward by Sir Andrew Dilnot and last month you described our present arrangements for social care as ‘intolerable’ and urged the Government to grasp the nettle.
And so we shall. Yesterday I set out our plan to build back better after the pandemic by fixing the deeply rooted problems in health and social care that our predecessors avoided for decades. And in truth it is in large part the Mail’s campaign which drove this issue to the top of the agenda. The nation owes you a debt of gratitude for continuing to fight for this. After everything our country has been through, this is the time to do whatever is necessary to allow the recovery of our NHS from the ravages of Covid.
At the height of the pandemic, we all knew someone whose test or operation was delayed. We knew people who did their bit to protect the NHS by declining to seek help for new conditions. Now we must clear that backlog of missed operations and treatments.
We also need to pay good wages to the 50,000 extra nurses we are recruiting, and we have to go further than the 48 hospitals and 50 million more GP appointments we are already engaged in providing.
In short, if the NHS is going to recover, it will need even more than the record funding we have already committed.
So I am launching the biggest catch-up programme in the history of the NHS, designed to provide another nine million appointments, scans and operations.
The plan is to allow the NHS to treat 30 per cent more patients who need elective care by 2024/25, compared with before the pandemic. But none of this will be possible unless we fix the problem of social care. When Covid struck, 30,000 hospital beds in england – a third of the total – were occupied by patients who would have been better looked after elsewhere.
The inevitable consequence was that other people could not get the cancer treatment or hip operations or whatever help they needed. Many of those 30,000 were in hospital for fear of the costs of entering residential care and, tragically, their anguish was often justified.
At present, if you have a house worth £250,000 and you’re in care for eight years, then your bills could be enough to force you into a fire sale of your assets, of everything you acquired in a lifetime of work, effort and saving – and would otherwise have passed on to your children – until you are left with just £14,000. Dementia is a bolt from the blue; cancer is another. If the latter strikes, you at least have the assurance of knowing that the NHS will cover your treatment in full.
If you suffer the former, you have no such consolation. As things stand, many people face the risk of financial ruin in their last years.
No one can tell who may be in this position and who will not. But we do know that one in seven of us will face care costs of at least £100,000. So we are going to put an end this cruel lottery, something that, frankly, should have happened long ago.
Under our plan, everyone will share the risk of catastrophic care costs, allowing the Government to impose a limit on what people will ever have to pay.
From October 2023, no one starting care will pay more than £86,000 over their lifetime. Nobody with assets of less than £20,000 will have to pay anything at all. Anyone with assets between £20,000 and £100,000 will be eligible for meanstested support.
And we will address the anxiety that many feel for their parents or grandparents by investing in the quality of care, with £500million for hundreds of thousands of new training places, mental health support and improved recruitment.
THeSe profoundly necessary reforms will enable the recovery of the NHS as a whole, but they will come at a cost. I refuse to take the easy option of borrowing the money and imposing the burden on future generations.
Instead, I have reluctantly concluded that the only responsible course is to ask everyone to pay more.
So from April we will introduce a new UK-wide levy, raising almost £36billion over the next three years, with the money legally reserved for health and social care across the United Kingdom.
This will be the fairest way of sharing the costs between individual taxpayers and businesses. Those who earn more will pay more and the highest earning 14 per cent of the population will pay around half of the total.
Meanwhile, no one earning below £9,568 will pay a penny, most small businesses will be protected, and 40 per cent will pay nothing extra at all.
No one in this Conservative Government wants to raise taxes. But after the extraordinary exertions of the NHS – and the sacrifices made by countless people – we cannot shirk the challenge.
Now the Government will do what we must to ease the anxiety of millions and ensure the NHS recovers from Covid.