The Yorkshire Post says: We need leaders, not quangos, to fix care home crisis

Despite the think-tank Civitas making a persuasive case for a new Whitehall department just hours before the Local Government Association set out its considerable concerns, more politicians – and quangos – are, with the greatest of respect, not necessarily the answer.

What Britain needs is more effective leaders who are capable of planning for the long term and working with others, both from the public and private sector, to ensure short-term decisions don’t have long-term repercussions that Britain might live to regret. As the LGA report intimates, it’s absurd that local authority care homes are being shut when there’s likely to be a chronic shortage of such facilities in the medium term to accommodate a population that will be both older and, by its very nature, less mobile.

Not only does such short-sightedness fail to make sense when many NHS hospitals cannot discharge elderly patients who no longer require medical treatment because of community care shortcomings, but it also highlights the need to plan ahead and ensure new properties are built with the immobile in mind so it is possible, for example, to fit a stairlift at a later date.

This does not require another tier of politicians; what it demands is a healthy dollop of common sense.