I’m on a mission to repair broken social care system

WELCOME to 2024! I hope you and yours had a restful Christmas and New Year period, spent with loved ones and making treasured memories.

As we enter 2024, we continue to face immense challenges across our country as we suffer from almost 14 years of Conservative government.

No where is the impact of that period displayed more clearly than in the crisis facing our social care system; it is broken.

Broken for people experiencing care, their families, the staff that look after them and local authorities trying to deliver the service under untold budgetary pressures.

It is simply not good enough.

I have heard first-hand about the impact our failing social care system is having on local people, with endless stories of people from all backgrounds facing untold challenges or unpaid carers being pushed to the brink.

When people who have worked hard and paid into the system their whole lives, are not getting the security, or basic decency, in the care they receive, we have failed.

But it’s not just those in need of care that are being let down by this government, it is the families and loved ones around them.

In Stockport, almost one in 50 people undertake some form of unpaid care with the burden, as it often does, falling disproportionately on women.

Not satisfied enough with the distress caused by moving the goalposts on the state pension age, the Conservative Party sits back as a generation of women care for the ones they love, without a government that cares for them.

It’s why I’m immensely proud to be Labour’s Shadow Minister for Social Care and I hope this year I can remove the shadow from that title and implement our plan to start fixing the broken system we will inherit from the Tories.

It’s a 10-year vision for reform culminating in the creation of a National Care Service.

We will deliver a fair pay agreement, giving social care workers the pay, terms and conditions and rights at work that they have been lacking for far too long.

We will enshrine the principle of home-first care, joining up services with the NHS to best meet the needs of those who use them.

It’s a mission that drives me, and a mission that will be central to the work of the next Labour government.

Let’s make 2024 the year we put it into action.