From the Editor: Social care reform back in the long grass
The Care Home Environment Magazine
The Care Home Environment is the leading business information resource focusing on the build and equipping of care homes
It is very hard to see the government’s announcement of a social care commission – one that will take until 2028 to make long-term recommendations for the reform of the sector – as anything other than The Labour Party ’s decision to once again kick the challenge of fixing social care into the long grass.
Rightly, social care leaders have reacted witheringly to the fact that the commission will not even issue a report identifying ‘the critical issues facing adult social care’ until mid-2026, given that the issues facing the sector – a rapidly ageing population needing ever greater levels of care, a current workforce shortfall of 130,000+, woefully inadequate local government funding for care, eye-watering private care costs, and a continued failure by successive governments to set out any sustainable vision for social care, to name just some of the key challenges – are already blindingly obvious.
As Care England ’s Prof Martin Green asks: “This commission will simply confirm what we already know – how many more reports must we endure before action is taken?” Meanwhile, NCF CEO Professor Vic Rayner insists that “it is imperative that the secretary of state and the wider government understand that the pressures laid bare across the social care sector cannot wait.”
At the end of the day, The Labour Party had years in opposition to work out a way forwards for social care, and ought now to be using its enormous new majority – unlikely to be repeated at the next election in 2029 – to put such plans into action. The government’s stated intention – as set out by minister of state for care Stephen Kinnock – to “build cross-party consensus” on how to reform social care is, in my opinion, disingenuous; a frustrated and impatient electorate voted for bold and meaningful change across the board, not for yet more talking shops and continued government inaction.
The chair of the commission, Baroness Casey, has called this “an opportunity to start a national conversation”, despite the fact that such a “conversation” has been going on for years. In her recent article in The Guardian, chief leader writer Sonia Sodha says that Casey has, in fact, been given “the wrong brief”, and that the prime minister ought to have told Casey “what he wants the system to look like and put her in charge of delivering it.” Sodha rightly points out that “the biggest decision that urgently needs to be made on social care – how to fund it – is a political choice.”
It is a choice that – to nobody’s surprise – the new Labour government has chosen to avoid making. Instead, the long grass beckons.
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