My Lords, I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—it is not very often that I say that—on the importance of social care and many of the points he made on the subject. It is one of the two great issues facing us, the other being climate change. The advantage of social care is that it is entirely within our control. It does not have to depend on what other countries do; we can do it ourselves.
I was genuinely pleased when Boris Johnson said very soon after the election that he had a fully prepared plan for social care. We have been looking forward to that after five promised Green Papers down the pan. In fact, I have been looking forward to it since I sat on a royal commission 20 years ago. Now, apparently, we have it.
Unfortunately, when the Queen’s Speech came along, it did not look quite so good. The first element referred to was an extra £1 billion for social care now. That is rather like sticking your little finger in a water cannon—it will go nowhere. The second element was ensuring that nobody had to sell their house to pay for care. But
nobody has to now. We passed in the last Parliament the deferred payment scheme so that nobody has to sell their house in their lifetime to pay for care. If they cannot pay for care, they can borrow from the local authority, and that is paid after they die. No individual ever has to pay for their own care by selling their house.
The third element was more attractive but slightly mysterious: he was going to seek a consensus on social care. I am in two minds about that. It is highly desirable that we get a consensus on social care, because then there will be a greater chance that people can plan on the basis of policy that they know will go forward for years to come, no matter what Government are in power, and that is a very good thing. However, there was a little suspicious bell that went off in my head that said, “Achieving consensus—what an opportunity for endless further delay.” If the Government were serious in proposing it, it could be happening now. Labour published its plan for social care in its manifesto; I happen to think it is not a very good one in many respects, but it is a plan that is there and ready to debate. Although we have not seen the detail of it, we have the word of the Prime Minister—nothing could trump that, surely—that the Government have a prepared plan. This month, this week, this afternoon, the two sides could be sitting down together and hammering out a compromise consensus on the way forward for social care.
Two attempts have been made at achieving consensus on social care before, and two blew up. One blew up when the Tories suddenly decided halfway through the talks to call Labour’s plans a “death tax”. Labour got its revenge halfway through the next set of talks by declaring that the Government’s plans were a “dementia tax”. If we play politics with this thing, we will get nowhere with it. It is beyond and more serious than politics, but it requires a certain amount of political skill to solve.
The one concrete suggestion I would make is that, if we are to have such talks, there be a completely neutral chairman or mediator whose job is to try to bring the two sides together. Incidentally, I have some experience in this, although in a quite different context. The bookmakers and greyhound racing had been at complete loggerheads for 10 years about increasing the bookmakers’ contributions. I, as a greyhound man, was asked by Tracey Crouch to see whether we could reach a solution. It was possible to do so because both sides knew that if they were the ones who messed things up, I would go public and say, “This is the bookmakers’ fault” or “This is the greyhound industry being too greedy.” You need a referee of that kind, of independent force and influence, so that the talks do not collapse into political chaos but result in the lasting solution which older people and their relatives so richly deserve.
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