It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson), who speaks so compellingly about his family’s experiences and sets out the case for why we must get social care right.
I welcome the Bill. It was a pleasure to serve on the Joint Committee on the Draft Care and Support Bill and I think the legislation has been greatly improved by its passage through that Committee and through the House of Lords. It establishes that we need a social care system that works around the needs of individuals, as well as the well-being principle and the vital prevention principle set out so compellingly by the hon. Member
for Sefton Central. The Bill also consolidates a confusing patchwork of legislation that I remember coming up against in my time in the NHS. People were not sure what their eligibility was, and they could move from one part of the country to another and find that they no longer qualified in the way that they used to.
There are many things to welcome in the Bill. The hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) compellingly set out the effect of losing everything in the ghastly lottery of eligibility. Setting a cap on costs and raising the threshold from that paltry £23,250 to £100,000 is very welcome. So too is the focus on better information, advice and advocacy, and the assessment and better support for carers. My hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) made some important points about child carers and the transition from children’s services to adult services.
There is a huge amount to welcome in the Bill and I could talk for 10 minutes on why all these aspects are important. Unfortunately, we also need to focus on the challenges. The predominant challenge is demographic. Nationally 2.2% of the population are over 85, but in my constituency we got there 31 years ago. By 2020-21 2.9% of the population will be over 85, but for Torbay that figure will be 4.9%. That represents an enormous demographic challenge. We were discussing with the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) the reasons why age is so important in assessing need. Because of their demographics, places such as Torbay and wider south Devon face additional challenges with rurality, which means that they are under pressure like never before. Although I fully understand that we must take into account deprivation and health inequalities, unless we take sufficient account of age and need in assessing the formulae, the system will collapse.
I should point out that Torbay is not only nationally renowned but internationally renowned. As a member of the Health Committee, when we visited Copenhagen and Sweden, I ended up being shown slides of Torbay—how Torbay organises health and social care. If we look at the challenges facing Torbay, we see that it was those demographic and financial challenges that were the driver for looking at how health and social care could be better integrated and—I refer to the experience of the hon. Member for Sefton Central—how avoidable admissions could be reduced. Enormous progress has been made. Waiting times for occupational therapy have been reduced from two weeks to two days, for physiotherapy from eight weeks to 48 hours, and for urgent equipment to help keep people at home from four weeks to four hours. As a result, Torbay has the lowest hospital admission rate for elderly vulnerable people in the whole of the south-west.