Will Jeremy Hunt’s new job title make any difference to the rather precarious state of the social care sector? Opposition parties have been accusing Theresa May of ‘window-dressing’ by changing the name of the Health department to the Department of Health and Social Care – though if this reshuffle is about window-dressing, May must never, ever consider a career in retail. Changing names does signal intentions, but it can also have no more effect on policy than a change in stationery.
Hunt will be taking control of the government’s green paper on social care, which as I’ve been reporting, hasn’t been so much kicked into the long grass as chucked into a forest so that no one raises the toxic issue in the way they did in the election. The Health and Social Care Secretary is known to have been frustrated by some of the lack of enthusiasm for coming up with a long-term solution for social care funding, and has been pressing for a while for the NHS and social care to be better integrated, so his request for more control of the policy makes a great deal of sense.
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