Adult social care

The Labour Party conference gets underway in Liverpool today, with Andy Burnham giving his big sit-down interview to Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC. The key exchange focused on social care: a topic about which the Prime Minister has spoken constantly in recent weeks. His father, Roy, died a fortnight ago, suffering from Alzheimer’s, and Burnham spoke with feeling about his own family’s personal struggles with care. His criticisms of the existing system will strike a chord with many. ‘Social cost in England is as unfair as healthcare cost in America,’ he said. ‘There is a cost, people are paying care charges now.’ The Prime Minister seems to have a clear sense of what he believes is the promised land Few would defend the existing system as either functional or fair.

If Daniel Defoe had been writing about modern budgets, he would have adapted his famous saying to include the certainty of death, taxes and an absence of a long-term plan for adult social care. Once again, the statement from the Chancellor had a yawning gap where the settlement for funding the beleaguered sector should be. There was no mention of social care in Rishi Sunak's speech or in the Budget Red Book, either. The government's answer to complaints about this is that ministers will publish a white paper on social care reform — but we've been hearing this line for years now. There was no mention of social care in Rishi Sunak's speech or in the Budget Red Book Indeed, we might be hearing this line for longer than we're being led to believe currently.