National Care Service: government to publish social care plan within next 12 months

He pledged on BBC Breakfast that the plan would be published in 12 months. It comes as Labour launched a consultation on the future of the NHS, promising to put patients and staff at the heart of its forthcoming 10-year health plan.

Campaigners have criticised the new government for their sluggish action on social care, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves indefinitely delaying the cap on costs.

However, Mr Kinnock claimed Labour has “hit the ground running with our fair pay agreement for adult social care workers”.

“That’s part and parcel of a plan to create a National Care Service,” he said.

“We’re going to develop standards for the care service, we’re going to fix the crisis in the adult social care labour market with all those vacancies through our fair pay agreement.

“We’re going to create a much better interface between adult social care and the acute sector - 14 per cent of people currently in hospital are medically fit for discharge but are not being discharged because they don’t have a care package.”

Mike Padgham, chair of the Independent Care Group in North Yorkshire, told the Yorkshire Post that “a year seems like an awfully long time”.

“Given they are announcing the NHS plan now, we should be doing the two things together,” he said.

“Cross-party talks are all well and good but we’ve had those things before, and they tend to slow things down. My view is we just need to get on with it - we know what needs to be done.

“We can’t help them with NHS waiting lists if they don’t fix social care.”

Mr Padgham wants the government to bring in the cap on care costs and put more value in the profession of adult social care workers.

While the Liberal Democrats accused the government of kicking “the can down the road”.

The party’s health and social care spokesperson, Helen Morgan MP, said: “The previous Conservative government ignored this crisis and left our social care system on the brink of collapse. It is not good enough for the government to kick the can down the road yet again.

“We need to begin cross-party talks immediately to get social care on a long-term sustainable footing.

Mr Kinnock said that the “adult social care plan will run alongside the healthcare plan that we are bringing forward”.

The NHS proposals will be published in 2025, and will see greater use of data and technology.

New laws are set to be introduced to make patient records available across all NHS hospitals, GP surgeries and ambulance services in England.

Speaking at a launch event yesterday, the Prime Minister said: “We need to go from analogue to digital, we need to use much better technology, whether that is in the ambulance service, in our hospitals, in our neighbourhoods, making much more use of technology.”

Sir Keir Starmer said he wants to “make a neighbourhood health service much closer to people in their community”, and also to see more preventative healthcare, adding: “If we can get in early and prevent people becoming as ill as they sometimes become, what a game-changer that would be.”

Asked about privacy concerns, Mr Kinnock said: “We’re bringing forward primary legislation, which will give you that cast-iron guarantee that all of the security protocols will be in place.”

He told the BBC: “If you constantly just say, we can’t do this because of data protection concerns, you’re just going to have the status quo going on and on and on.”

He described the Government’s plans as “no different to online banking apps” and “definitely more NatWest than it is Star Trek”.

“In the end, if we don’t modernise the NHS, make it more efficient and productive, you can have the best data protection rules in the world, but you’re not going to have a health and care system that actually works,” he added.