S By Judy Hirst
SUTTERSTOCK / CRAIG ZADUCK
ocial care wasn’t just the dog that barked in June’s general election. It went on the rampage, tore up the furniture and nearly mauled its owner to death. The bright sparks who thought it a good idea to alienate vast swathes of middle England by inserting a so-called “dementia tax” into the Conservative manifesto have long since been shown the door.
Politicians are not confronting the social care funding crisis. This failure is letting down older people, now and in the future
But the mess they left behind – particularly after Theresa May’s U-turn on the subject – not only helped lose the government its majority. It also landed her fragile administration with a huge dilemma: how to solve a problem like social care funding without earning the opprobrium of older voters and their offspring. The ill-fated manifesto proposals, which ditched a future cap on care costs and created new liabilities for home care charges, were greeted with even more uproar than Labour’s 2010 “death tax”. So can politicians ever say anything meaningful about care charges, winter fuel allowances or triple-lock pension entitlements without instantly undermining the all-important grey vote? Previous governments have generally opted to play dead on the issue. Or to set up a commission and ignore its findings, which amounts to the same thing. Given the choice – particularly after the June debacle – this administration would like to follow suit. Recently appointed care minister Jackie Doyle-Price has been keeping an even lower profile than her predecessor David Mowat. Both the Department of Health and the Cabinet Office, which is leading the consultation process, have maintained near radio silence on the long-promised social care funding green paper. The topic was off limits at the Conservative party conference. Although there is some expectation of an announcement in the chancellor’s autumn Budget, local government insiders say the issue has been downgraded by Whitehall. Ministers are far more preoccupied with intergenerational fairness and courting the elusive youth vote. Even so, forgetting about the care costs conundrum is not an option, not least because of its impact on the NHS. Ironically, the manifesto meltdown has had an upside. “The good news is there is growing public recognition of the issues,” says Izzi Seccombe, chair of the Local Government Association’s community wellbeing board. “The election debate showed that, and the vast majority of MPs agree there needs to be a cross-party solution. This momentum must be maintained.” Numerous commission and inquiry reports have spelt out just how inequitable and unsustainable existing funding arrangements are. Sir Andrew Dilnot – and before him Lord Sutherland, Sir Derek Wanless and Dame Kate Barker – have all made the case for a new social care funding settlement (see ► panel overleaf ).
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