The hon. Member may not remember the Dilnot plan, which had cross-party support until Conservative Members torpedoed it. He may not have read the five principles that Labour has set out to underpin our approach to social care, including preventive investment to keep people at home and living independently for as long as possible, as we all want to. We have a plan that would invest in the workforce. It is not enough just to wish for better social care; the people have to be there
to deliver it. That is Labour’s plan, and if the hon. Member would like more details, I am very happy to send them to him.
Despite 1.6 million people waiting for treatment, there was no guarantee in last week’s Budget that mental health will receive its fair share of NHS funding. Health stakeholders were most critical of the lack of a workforce strategy or a multi-year funding settlement to support it. We cannot deliver world-class healthcare if we do not invest in recruitment, retention and staff development. It is no wonder that the NHS is struggling when the number of adult health and care students declined by 15% in the three years before the pandemic.
The pandemic also shone a light on the problems that our schools, colleges and early years providers were already facing. No doubt it exacerbated them, but it did not create them. Last week, the Chancellor set out a £3 billion investment in skills, and the Secretary of State claimed that it was the biggest in a decade—but it comes after a decade of cuts to post-16 provision. The Learning and Work Institute calculates that funding over the spending review period will still amount to only 60% of the 2010 figure.
It is astonishing that at a time when our economy has to adapt to the challenges that the Secretary of State referred to—globalisation, digitisation and climate change in the post-Brexit environment—investment in skills remains so lacking. Four in 10 young people are leaving education without the level of qualification they need, the number of apprenticeships has fallen by more than 40%, and 9 million adults lack basic skills in literacy or numeracy. No wonder the Chancellor can promise only a paltry 1.5% increase in growth in the final three years of the forecast period.
At the same time that it is talking up the importance of vocational education, the Department for Education is scrapping most BTECs—well-recognised and respected qualifications that give opportunities to hundreds of thousands of young people.