Whack! That’s the sound of social care reform once again being hit into the long grass. Thud! Another hit sends it into a thicket of scrub. Not only has Labour announced a ‘longer-term’ solution to a problem the party itself has acknowledged is urgent by setting up a commission that won’t report until 2028, but it has also taken steps to make that reform even harder to realise by saying it is looking for a ‘cross-party solution’.
Ministers have set up a taskforce led by crossbench peer Louise Casey to draw up plans for a national care service, which will produce an interim report in 2026, and a final set of recommendations in 2028. The appointment of Casey is one of the few good things about this whole sorry story, along with more money going into the Disabled Facilities Grant, which allows people to install ramps, stairlifts and other adaptations to their homes. The rest of it is deeply frustrating – though not very surprising.
Casey, who has been a tsar on pretty much everything else in government over the past few decades, will first examine the problems facing social care and recommend medium-term reforms in 2026. Then her second phase will provide the longer-term solutions, reporting just as the parties are going into election campaigning mode. Health Secretary Wes Streeting is setting up cross-party talks from next month, in order to build a ‘national consensus’. The other parties have said they want to work together on it, he said, adding: ‘I hope that when the commission repots ahead of the next general election, we can all agree on the direction on social care for the long term. In the meantime, this government is getting on with the job.’
What could possibly go wrong? Well, Andy Burnham might be able to tell us, given he produced a similar long-term solution for social care involving a national care service and cross-party talks back in 2009. Streeting knows very well that the cross-party consensus ended in acrimony, with the Conservatives branding his solution a ‘death tax’. Streeting also knows – because he was by this point an MP fighting for his seat – that Labour got its revenge in 2017 by branding Theresa May’s election solution for social care a ‘dementia tax’. It’s almost as though cross-party talks might be valuable in the same way as ecumenical events are: everyone lights candles together and talks about shared values, but no one comes away having changed religion.
The parties all have totally different views on how social care should be administered because they have different first principles on the size of the state, the role of individual wealth and assets in society, and even on how much responsibility for caring families should take. There have been – by my counting – six commissions since 1997 looking at social care. Legislation for social care is still sitting on the statute books after it was proposed by one of those commissions, which was led by Andrew Dilnot. What could Louise Casey possibly discover in the next three years that hasn’t already been covered in the reams of paper produced by governments, select committees, think tanks and others? That social care is quite difficult to reform? That it is urgently in need of reform? It will be even more so by 2028. The only thing that really changes now is the severity of the crisis.
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