A WELFARE STATE MK II     

I welcome the Conservative Party joining with the Government in recognising that it is essential to design a fairer, more sustainable care system for older people. On  Tuesday’s “You and Yours”, Radio 4 devoted the whole hour’s programme to this important subject.

As our society ages, finding a fair solution for long term care funding is both urgent and challenging.

When the post-war reforming Labour Government brought in our welfare state, life expectancy was 66 for men and 71 for women.  Today it is 77 for men and 82 for women – and still rising.  It is great that we are living longer, but sometimes this means that people become very dependent and have very high care needs towards the end of their life.

Currently one in five pensioners (20 per cent) have care costs totalling over £50,000.  It’s hugely worrying for us all that none of us can predict if this will apply in our own later life.

The fact that we now have more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 18 means we cannot rely on taxing working people to pay for retired people’s care. It would place an intolerable burden on families. It is clear that both main parties now recognise that this is the case. 

Finding the solution to this is not simple. We can all see that the voluntary insurance system encouraged by the previous Conservative government didn’t work. Premiums were too high, take up was too low.  The scheme simply folded. There needs to be a much more effective way of spreading the risk of care costs.

I have personally involved myself in looking for solutions to this question, and have for over two years been running a series of conferences and consultations in Stafford constituency. The Government has also stimulated debate, first with a discussion paper and more recently a Green Paper national consultation. All the major charities who are involved with care of the elderly have been involved, and this has now brought about a degree of consensus on where we need to go.

The debate mustn’t focus narrowly on care for older people either. There are important issues also regarding the lives of carers and people with disabilities. These are all changed circumstances that must now be planned for systematically.

There is broad agreement that we need to do as much as possible to help people stay in their own homes. The health and social care services need to work much more closely together to provide packages of care best suited to the individual. This is, in part, what is meant in the Green Paper – and mentioned in Gordon Brown’s Conference speech last week – by a National Care Service.

And there needs to be a fair way of spreading the risk of care costs.

Labour’s Green Paper asks for people’s opinions on three main options:

• A partnership option, in which both state and the individual pay,
• An Insurance system, involving either or both the private sector and government; and
• A comprehensive system, under which everyone contributes to the costs – like National Insurance. 

The pros and cons of these options are laid out in the Green Paper, the Big Care Debate http://careandsupport.direct.gov.uk/

I think it is important that as many people as possible study this issue, come to a view and feed in their opinions to the consultation, which ends this November.

The creation of the first welfare state was a great achievement. Today’s challenge is the design of a welfare state Mk II.

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