Social Care — House of Commons, 2018-04-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Laura Smith (Labour, Centre-left): It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) Four weeks ago today, one of my constituents from the village of Hough attended Parliament to speak at Age UK’s parliamentary reception. We meet some people in life whom we will never forget. Joyce Yoxall is one of those people. Those who came to the event will remember her harrowing account of life as an unpaid carer. I was as moved then as I was when I first visited Joyce at her home to discuss the problems she is having with our social care system. Joyce’s husband David suffered a stroke in 2014. Since then, she has been forced to stop the care that David should be entitled to because of its high cost and poor quality. She talked about crippling care costs and how she felt she had been "let down". I had to fight back the tears as she spoke about being mentally and physically exhausted, and how she dare not think of the year ahead Joyce has literally become the face of hundreds of thousands of people—and maybe more—who are in a similar situation by featuring on the front cover of Age UK’s aptly named report, "Why call it care when nobody cares?" The report is the result of 127 interviews regarding the quality of social care that people have experienced. I encourage anybody who has not read the report to do so The reason I started by talking about Joyce and David is that I want to remind everybody of the heartbreaking human reality behind the statistics I will refer to later. Let us start by reminding ourselves why those like Joyce might feel let down. As has been mentioned, a growing and ageing population is placing ever more demand on the social care sector, but that should not come as a surprise to anybody who has been living in the real world for at least some of the time in the past few decades Almost eight years ago, the Dilnot commission was set up by David Cameron’s coalition Government, tasked with making recommendations for changes to the funding of care. It published its recommendations in 2011, including a more generous means-testing threshold and a cap on care costs. That sounded promising, but after another general election the Government announced that the measures would be delayed until April 2020 and, at around the same time, closed the independent living fund. Then the Government promised to publish a Green Paper in the summer of 2017, but along came yet another general election, during which the current Prime Minister threatened to introduce a dementia tax Since then, we have had an autumn Budget in which the Chancellor failed even to mention social care, let alone provide adequate funding. We have seen the Department for Health and Social Care’s single departmental plan, which failed to mention the social care workforce. More recently, we had the spring statement, and still there is no lifeline for those with care needs or their families or carers We know that at some point, hopefully before the summer recess, the Government will publish their Green Paper on social care for older people, but we do not yet know when any proposals will be implemented after the consultation. To make matters worse, the Green Paper will not cover care for younger adults, which accounts for almost half of all council spending on adult social care.