I probably agreed with at least three quarters of what the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) just said. One thing I did not agree with him on was his belief that the Government have grasped the nettle. I believe they have walked past the nettle, barely nodding
at it, and the people who will be stung are the people still in social care, the people working in social care, and the people who will disproportionately pay for what the Government are proposing.
Conservative MPs and the Conservative press are concerned about the Prime Minister breaking his promise on taxation, but the promise he has most definitely broken is the one he made during the leadership contest in 2019, when he said he would
“fix the crisis in social care once and for all”.
He has done no such thing; that proposal is not before the House today. There was a promise not to raise taxes. If the Government chose to break that promise, I would be happy to provide them with cover for that. Labour may have dodged the issue, but I am clear that we should raise income tax so that this is paid for by people who have the wealth and ability to pay for it—not by national insurance, which often will disproportionately fall on younger working-age people. What do those people tend to have in common? They cannot afford a home, or at least a house that they own. What will we be asking them to do? To fund those who have a home to have the right to leave it to those who come after them.
Nobody should be forced to sell their home to pay for care. Just a few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who sadly has cancer. This was a terrible thing to say, but he said, “I feared cancer and I feared dementia, but I’ve got the least bad of the two.” He is living with cancer now. The reality is that, for many reasons, his care is paid for, but for those like my father-in-law, my grandfather and others who suffer from dementia, that care is not provided for. So it is right to have radical reform of social care, but this is not it. It is right that all the parties should get together to ensure we have a common approach to this, but this proposal has been dreamt up and issued as a press release—it is not the reform of social care we need.
This reform of social care does nothing to tackle the 120,000 care assistant vacancies in our country, or to give social care staff the pay and esteem they deserve. One reason there is a crisis is that wonderful people can earn more money stacking shelves than they can caring for our loved ones, of whatever age. This plan will do nothing to give local authorities the money they need to backfill the terrible backlog and black holes that the Government have left them. Again, they are taking unpaid carers for granted and—the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith) rightly mentioned this earlier—not addressing the needs of those in care who are not of retirement age but significantly younger. This is a massive missed opportunity that will be paid for by people who have the least.
In my community in Cumbria, we are about 10 years above the national average age. We have a smaller working-age population and a disproportionately large population in need of care. We have colossal staffing shortages as things are. This measure does nothing to meet the needs of the people in my community, because it does nothing to invest in the quality and standard of the care that they will receive.