Don’t delay social care reform any longer – Yorkshire Post Letters

WHILST welcoming NHS reform, it is appalling that improvements for social care are once again being pushed to “later in the year” (The Yorkshire Post, February 12).

Reforming NHS care without reforming social care is like rebuilding a house without mending the roof.

In a country where £8bn has been cut from social care budgets since 2010, some 1.4m people are living without the care they need and there are 110,000 vacancies for social care staff, we shouldn’t be waiting any longer.

Talk of closer integration is all very well – every government in the past 30 years has talked about it – but the reality is that it never happens.

Social care needs urgent, root and branch reform to put it on a par with NHS healthcare and make it fit for purpose. Anything less is just window dressing.

From: Steve Wilson, Bradford.

IN extending the school day, Robert Halfon MP (The Yorkshire Post, February 13) makes a very reasoned case not only to assist pupils in an academic catch-up but a far wider sense.

However, there is an irony here for what he suggests is only what we enjoyed several decades ago before school sport was extinguished in the state sector for a variety of reasons, none of which made any sense.

Surely one more inescapable truth the pandemic has laid bare is the focus on exam grades and short-term cost-cutting at the expense of physical wellbeing comes home to roost.

From: Alec Denton, Guiseley.

BILL Carmichael got it absolutely correct (The Yorkshire Post, February 12). If the telling of lies is now to become a criminal offence, then many politicians should be quaking in their shoes and hoping the legislation will not be made retrospective.

Thank you for saying it as it is. The task facing the Government is enormously difficult, but far too many Cabinet ministers have performed badly and some pronouncements really do give the impression a number are becoming power-mad and, as Mr Carmichael says, ‘losing connection with reality’.

From: J A King, Thurgoland.

IT never fails to amaze me that educated people after all the selfish us-only attitude and a protectionist EU, still think that we should be controlled by them. People are also blaming the downturn in business on Brexit. They obviously do not appreciate that the EU is also suffering a massive downturn in business due to the pandemic, just like we are.

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