I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Ruth Edwards) for her remarks.
My constituency has a disproportionately older demographic—those who live there are 50% more likely to be over 65 than the national average—but I want to lay to rest the misperception on both sides of the House that social care is simply about the older generation. More than one in three people in the system is under the age of 65, and because younger adults are in the system for longer, spend on them is proportionately greater, so this is not just about a battle of the generations.
I pay tribute to the millions of unpaid carers in society who for years have been papering over the cracks in the system and the capricious nature of continuing healthcare assessments. I have personal experience of some of that as for many years my father was my mother’s unpaid carer and had to deal with that at the sharp end. For that reason, I celebrate the fact that this is a nettle grasped. It is not necessarily the whole solution but it is the start of a package of measures that moves forward a debate that has been stalled for too long. That is one reason why we should all come to the House and use our voice and platform on the hard issues that we face in society.
I applaud the Government on their selection of national insurance, which is the tax with the broadest reach. It is progressive, and that is why so many of our European neighbours have chosen to fund their social systems through similar measures. It is a chimera to think that there is another way—perhaps Opposition Members have been taking medicinal hallucinogenics—because the national insurance take is more than 10 times that of capital gains tax and inheritance tax combined. No mythical tax on wealth will give us anything like what we need to take this issue seriously—and we should take it seriously.