Alarming lack of urgency in Labour's plan for social care: Mike Padgham

What we wanted to see was radical reform, not the tinkering around the edges that we were once again served.

If I had to rank the three major parties in terms of their promises on social care, I’d be tempted to say, Liberal Democrats, Labour and Conservatives, in that order.

The Liberal Democrats have promised free personal care, a new carer’s minimum wage, £2 above the current minimum wage, a Royal College of Care Workers and an increase in Carers’ Allowance to support unpaid carers.

All good and very laudable stuff but, being realistic, coming from a party currently languishing fourth in the polls and likely to get about 10 per cent of the vote. A long way off the levers of power and therefore the ability to convert manifesto promises into actions.

Labour on the other hand looks, at this stage, most likely to form the next Government and therefore its thoughts on social care deserve the greatest attention and scrutiny.

On the face of it, their manifesto talks the talk: it pledges “deep reform” including a National Care Service and ‘home first’ care to keep people living independently. It has also promised greater integration with NHS services and fairer pay, terms and conditions to ‘professionalise’ the workforce. These outline measures were wrapped in comforting phrases like “ensuring everyone lives an independent, prosperous life.” What stood out from Labour’s manifesto was, sadly, what it didn’t say.

Amidst all the talk of reform, partnership working, high-quality care, fair pay and family support, there was no detail and crucially, no timetable as to when any of this might happen.

Labour talks of consulting widely on the issue of pay in the sector and of “building consensus” towards the creation of a National Care Service. This terminology serves to suggest that none of this is happening any day soon. I accept that social care reform cannot happen overnight and that it is a two-parliament project. But I detected an alarming lack of urgency in Labour’s manifesto. This, allied to that lack of any real detail, makes me fear that social care reform won’t be priority one if Labour wins the election.

If Labour was short on detail, the Conservatives were almost silent. In its single paragraph on the issue, the Conservatives repeated their pledge to introduce the Dilnot recommended cap on care costs, designed to help people budget for care and avoid having to sell their home to pay for it.

Good news indeed, had we not heard the same pledge again and again in recent years, only to see it kicked down the road. Aside from that, the Conservatives promised to give local authorities a multi-year funding settlement to support social care and to attract and retain a high-quality care workforce, make reforms to shape the market for older people’s housing and support unpaid carers.

It was left to the Green Party to really catch the eye on care, with a promise of £20bn to introduce free personal care and provide better pay and a career structure for the care workforce.

In our manifesto, the ICG calls for the creation of a National Care Service, bringing NHS healthcare and social care under one roof, allied to greater investment in the sector and better recognition and reward for the workforce.

It wants to see care provided for the 1.6m people who currently can’t access it and dementia treated like other serious conditions like heart disease and cancer and its treatment funded through the NHS.

The harsh truth is that the Covid-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and severe staff shortages followed years of neglect and under-funding by politicians from all parties and have all combined to leave the sector in deep crisis. We looked to this General Election as a big opportunity for change and so far, it has broadly failed to deliver.

The major political parties are continuing to run away from social care. They are frightened of it. Terrified to promise the investment needed to save the sector and provide care for those who need it and afraid to come up with radical proposals because parties who have done so in the past have suffered criticism in the run-up to polling day.

They fail to see that reforming social care should be a golden opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of vulnerable people in our local communities.

Instead, we are left with just vague, outline promises on social care and that isn’t really good enough. We have had three decades of reports, commissions, consultations and endless, endless promises. All of them have come to nothing and been broken. We can’t let that happen again.

Of course, there is still time. Maybe one or other of the contenders will step up and say, ‘this is our vision for social care and this is when we will do it’, but I’m not holding my breath.

As local candidates continue their hustings and their knocking on doors, it is up to us to press them on the urgency of social care reform so that the message gets passed along. If we don’t, then we can’t be surprised if we wake up on July 5 still with a mountain to climb to get social care tackled properly.

Mike Padgham is chairman of the Independent Care Group