Today (Wednesday 26th February) the government were supposed to take part in the first round of cross-party talks about how to improve social care in England.
Arguably the last five years have been the hardest for social care. The sector have experienced a financial crash, a global pandemic and a change of government all while receiving little to no support. This was all supposed to change today, alas the industry has been let down once again.
According to the BBC, who were the first to report on this story, government officials who were due to be involved in the social care reform talks today received an email to say their meeting has been postponed.
Wes Streeting had invited members of the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green Party to take part in the discussion, which was set to involve Baroness Louise Casey, but Tory sources suggested individuals invited ought to have been given more notice and a clear agenda of what will be talked about in the meeting.
Meanwhile, Baroness Casey is also set to chair the independent commission which has been created to establish ‘clear recommendations’ for how to rebuild the social care sector. However, critics have accused the government of being too slow with setting out the timescale – the commission has been split into two phases, with the first due to report back mid-2026.
Although the second phase isn’t due to report back until 2028.
To give context on how badly reform is needed, figures from The King’s Fund show local authorities in England spent £28.4bn on social acre in 2022/23 and also reported 818,000 people received publicly funded long-term social care in 2021/22, with a further 224,000 people receiving short-term care.
Eventually, Wes Streeting has claimed the government’s aim is to establish a ‘National Care Service’ that would ‘finally grasp the nettle on social care reform’ but that it ‘would take time’ to devise a model fit for the future.
Photo by James Newcombe via UnSplash
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