Tories’ anger as Budget fails to address social care funding crisis

FORMER Tory cabinet ministers have hit out at the absence of any plan for social care reform in the Budget, amid concerns that the rising costs of the current system will have to be funded by council tax increases.

Jeremy Hunt, the Tory chairman of the Commons health select committee, warned the social care sector had been left “bruised”, “demoralised” and with “little hope” following the most devastating year in its history.

After the Budget, he tweeted: “Understand money is difficult to commit at this stage, but they desperately need to know a plan is coming.”

Damian Green, the former first secretary of state and now co-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on adult social care, said: “I share the impatience for a solution to this. It’s more important as we recover from the pandemic.”

Calling on ministers to take action, he told The Daily Telegraph: “This has to be the year the Government comes forward with proposals.”

Andrew Lewer, another Tory MP on the all-party group, warned the costs of the current system “are only going to rise” and that local authorities were unable to devise “anything other than short-term sticking plaster solutions to their care difficulties”. He added: “Without a clear direction of travel for the future of adult care, it inevitably leads to concerns that that lack of certainty will be reflected in council tax increases.”

Questions arose yesterday about the status of a plan that Boris Johnson claimed he had ready to implement when he became Prime Minister in July 2019, months before the pandemic.

Rishi Sunak said the current focus was on Covid-19, but insisted that ministers were “committed” to finding a “cross-party” solution, reiterating a pledge in the Tories’ 2019 manifesto. However, Labour denied there had been any outreach or dialogue on the issue. Liz Kendall, Labour’s shadow minister for social care, said the Government had not “discussed or even raised” with the Opposition its plans to build a cross-party consensus.

Mr Sunak told BBC Radio 4: “I know the Health Secretary has started that work on trying to see what the solutions might be and at the appropriate time, if we can find consensus on a solution, we will bring that forward and have that conversation, but that is something that of course we remain committed to.”

It is 20 months on from Mr Johnson’s first speech as prime minister in which he said he was “announcing now – on the steps of Downing Street – that we will fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared”.

The Prime Minister’s press secretary, Allegra Stratton, said that the Government’s focus on “saving lives in care homes and other places” during the pandemic had meant “there just hasn’t been the chance to look in detail at what comes next”. She said Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, had written to all MPS on the issue in March 2020 and would pick that work up again as the coronavirus crisis eased.

Sir Andrew Dilnot, who led a review into the future of funding social care in 2011, said the lack of action on it was “a stain on our nation”. He said the broad outline of any plan would involve topping up the funding for council-delivered means-tested social care while creating “some form of social insurance” for the population to “pool the risk” should they need care later in life. He predicted it would need between £7 billion and £10 billion extra per year.

Anita Charlesworth, research director at the Health Foundation, an independent charity, said: “They deserve a social care system that is fit for purpose, meets the needs of the most vulnerable in society and provides decent employment for those who care. At the moment social care falls woefully short of those goals.”