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This should be the social care election – why is it being treated as anything but?
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But another huge problem we need to grapple with is that very few people who don’t receive or work in it, understand social care. Many are under the mistaken impression it is free at the point of need. In fact, only those with very high need and with next to no assets are eligible for publicly funded social care support. In recent years, the bars have become even higher, with anyone in possession of a home worth more than £23,350 expected to sell it to pay for any social care they need (though they may be able to effectively borrow against its value whilst remaining at home).

And many of us don’t really grasp what social care is – whether it’s help with washing and dressing for older people in their own homes, support with shopping and housework for disabled people, residential care for people unable to live independently, or social support for people with mental health issues, addictions, and domestic abuse victims. Few people realise how much of what used to be considered health care, has been stealthily redesignated as “social care” or “personal care”, so that it can be more easily outsourced, and/or charged for, whether delivered in someone’s home or a residential setting.

Even talk – as Zahawi did this morning – of (re)-integrating health and social care, glosses over the way private social care providers have already started to snaffle chunks of the NHS budget. Take the NHS’s 111 service, now run in many areas by the care home giant, Care UK. Or the huge sums of money the NHS now hands over to private care homes and nursing homes so that it can free up the shrunken number of NHS beds – with catastrophic results during the pandemic, of course.

What is to be done?

Whilst councils reasonably point out that it’s policy and budget decisions in Westminster that can fully solve the social care crisis, Labour and Lib Dem candidates do at least offer a few suggestions of ways forward at local level, whether through using their (limited) room for financial manoeuvre to raise more money, or (perhaps more productively at a local level) focusing on where the money goes – a crucial issue that has been absent from the debate for too long. Not to talk about social care privatisation leaves the issue strangely de-politicised, often focused on the need to ‘help’ the private social care sector, the same sector that was keen to cash in when the going was good.

In Southend, for example, Labour commits to “bringing services back in house wherever practicable”, though this refers to services in general, not particularly social care. In West Sussex, Labour pledges to end “wasteful spending on outsourced services”, and in Hertfordshire, (where 693 people have died with COVID in care homes) Labour goes further and reasserts the national party’s 2019 promise to “provide free personal care to all our clients” and even to “[remove] the distinction between health and social care needs”. These are bolder promises – but made in leafy shires where Labour candidates stand little chance of being elected to implement them. In closely fought Dudley, where 150 people died of COVID-19 in care homes, Labour’s pledges focus on jobs, environment and crime, and make no mention of social care.

The Lib Dems take a slightly different tack. In Gloucestershire, for example, they are calling for an inquiry into the “overall handling” of the pandemic and a “review of care staff employed by Gloucestershire County Council” – but the problem, as we have seen in the past year, is that the majority of care staff are not employed by councils, but by private employers. Still, it’s a start, of sorts.

But what a massive missed opportunity this election looks to be, of holding our politicians accountable for the way the system failed our most vulnerable people over the past year.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/this-should-be-the-social-care-election-why-is-it-being-treated-as-anything-but/