The Rundown Podcast: The Social Care Crunch

3 min read6 hr

This week on The Rundown, the panel discusses how the UK ended up with a crisis in social care, after successive administrations failed to grasp the nettle and deal with the rising costs of a sector that has ballooned in size to deal with our ageing population, while funding cuts have left local councils with their entire budgets swallowed up in providing statutory services.

To look at another of the knotty, seemingly intractable issues left in Labour’s in-tray when the party entered government last year, host Alain Tolhurst is joined by Paulette Hamilton, Labour MP and the acting chair of the health and social care select committee, as well as Joe Robertson, Conservative MP for the Isle of Wight who also sits on the select committee.

Alongside them are Lucinda Allen, policy fellow in social care at The Health Foundation, and Will Dalton, National Officer for Care at the GMB union, to discuss why from Andrew Dilnot’s infamous unimplemented review, to Theresa May’s election-losing 'dementia tax', Boris Johnson’s elusive ‘plan’ and the aborted Health and Social Care Levy, previous administrations have struggled to find the funding or political wherewithal for a long-term solution to how we look after those who need it.

They also look at what Keir Starmer is doing to take on the care crisis, whether the latest review commissioned by Health Secretary Wes Streeting is another exercise in kicking the can down the road, or will lead to a generational solution, and what impact this week’s immigration white paper and its crackdown on overseas staff will have on the sector.

Later on in the episode Joe Dromey from the Fabian Society discusses a new paper from the think tank which looks at how Labour can solve the issues over pay and recruitment that have left the sector with 131,000 vacancies and counting.

But first, Hamilton, whose committee released a report on the "cost of inaction" in social care last week, said: “The thing that came back at us was that social care was in crisis at the moment."

She said the findings of the latest review, being conducted by Baroness Louise Casey, needed to be put into practice "desperately", having found that “successive governments had just not done anything” in this sector.

The Labour MP told the podcast her committee had written to ministers this week, because “some of the things that government has said over the last week is causing absolute confusion”.

Citing the transfer of more of the decisions on the future of care to Baroness Casey she said: “We cannot see if the left hand is working with the right hand, and that means that in the middle are people that are receiving social care and and they are struggling.”

Asked if she fears the situation in social care will get worse if more time elapses before big structural changes are implemented, Hamilton replied: "It's worse than that; what the providers and others were saying, if we don't start to get some clarity, certain providers and organisations could actually be tipped over the edge."

The Rundown is presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced by Nick Hilton and edited by Ewan Cameron for Podot