Care is in crisis Action is needed on funding

THE CRISIS in social care for society’s most frail and vulnerable people has been brought into even sharper focus by the pandemic, with a disturbingly high death toll amongst residents.

Care is, along with the NHS, the most universal service in Britain.

At some point in their lives, virtually everyone will need it and yet the system is in real danger of collapse. For local authorities in particular, the spiralling costs are untenable.

Today’s report by the TUC emphasises the scale of the crisis and the everwidening gap between the amount being spent on care and the demands on the system.

It simply be cannot be right that eight per cent less is spent on looking after those most in need in 2020 than 10 years ago.

The Government is guilty of a shameful degree of prevarication on this issue. Despite Boris Johnson coming to office promising to fix the broken care system, a long- awaited green paper on how that is to be accomplished has still not been published.

This autumn’s spending review presents an opportunity for the Government to get a grip on the problems.

It is hard to disagree with the TUC’s assertion that a reversal of a decade’s cuts to budgets, and investment in staff recruitment and training are the only realistic ways of fixing the system.

Care cannot be delivered on the cheap.

Nor can it be left to drift further into crisis, with terrible consequences for those in need of it, however much that costs.