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Is the £1bn for social care irrelevant to the funding crisis in social care?
Clearly yes.
The money that Jeremy Hunt announced in his “fully funded” solution to social care is specifically designed to limit the amount individuals have to pay for their care so is specifically not meant to be about what councils pay for social care. The debate it is causing is about fairness – one side asking “is it fair for people to have to sell their homes to pay for care costs?”, the other side challenging “with limited resources is it wealthy homeowners who are most unfairly treated?” Let’s be clear, as interesting as the debate is, this £1bn is nothing to do with social care. It is a about how to improve fairness with limited public resources.
But no.
Even if this £1bn was put towards the social care funding challenge it would be just a drop in the ocean. Since Dilnot’s report, more than £1bn has been taken out by councils from their social care budget with much more planned. £1bn, or even several, will not solve the crisis. We need a new understanding of social care that amounts to a new social contract with the public. What these government proposals will do, if they work, is give the opportunity to shake up the whole system. For better or worse, it will fundamentally change the individual incentives within the system and the councils relationship to the 97% of older people they don’t support.
As an example of the change in approach needed, iMPOWER is pioneering work with six councils following on from the Home Truths report published in the Autumn. This argues that we need to change relationships between citizens and the state, and the state needs to sort it’s act out first – so we are working on the dysfunctional relationship between GPs and social care.
We will leave the “fairness” debate to the politicians and focus on any levers we have that give us the potential to transform the model of social care.
11th February 2013
Jeremy Cooper is a Director at iMPOWER. To contact him to discuss this blog please email jcooper@impower.co.uk or call 020 7017 8030.
Have your say
JOHN A GELMINI
It will indeed be a drop in the ocean given that 50% of county council,unitary authority,metropolitan borough council,London Borough Council ,Mid County Council and City Council budgets are represented by expenditure on Adult Social Care leaving just 50% for all other services at a time when Central Government is putting councils on a "Bactrian Camel " diet of less money. It also ignores emerging morbidity factors such as the early onset of dementia which is affecting 1.25 million woman over the age of 65 who are yet to enter the system,the current obesity crisis which has seen British woman become the fattest in Western Europe and men to become the 4th fattest. The present generation of UK children are on track to be the first generation of children to predecease their parents and with state education ages 5 to 18 ,44th in the world ,they are the least well equipped to compete in a global marketplace in a world where the UK is so uncompetitive it cannot pay its way. It ignores the idea of the Japanese and German concepts of using Asimo style robots in care homes for lifting,turning,toileting,bathing,showering and feeding Adult Social Care recipients,80% of whom the Government belatedly has discovered ,have dementia. It ignores the possibility through CRM/the ESD Toolkit of early intervention and it ignores the causes of dementia and the need for education to prevent it: --Drinking on an empty stomach --Bisphenol A in plastics,till rolls and the insides of tins --Poor diet lack of vitamin D --Ingesting Paracetemol --Living within 1/2 mile of an overhead electricity pylon --Too much sugar --Too few friends/living alone --Living unnaturally without love or someone to love --Switching off ,not reading enough,not taking an interest in anything,not getting over grief,wallowing in self pity --Not having a strong personal philosophy and the stoicism and mental toughness to prevail when the viccissitudes of life become overwhelming --Debauched living and pot taking by woman in the Flower Power era of the 1960,s now manifesting itself in the demented 65 year old woman of today --Poor lighting not matching the spectrum of sunlight --Lack of exercise --Car fumes --Exposure to aluminium --Smoking If this wasn't enough we now have 16.5 million people out of a workforce of 32 million who are either unemployed ,incapacitated,NEETS,in training programmes,forced off the register,sanctioned by benefits office staff,economically inactive and operating with multiple NI numbers who are not contributing to the system which is unaffordable unless long term care insurance can be brought in and made affordable. There are solutions but councils,citizens and politicians are going to have to take some very harsh home truths into account and bodies like the Alimentarius Commission will have to rethink what they have been doing along with the NHS which is not fit for purpose and the need to merge NHS and Adult Social Care provision to make it seamless.
02:36pm on 13 Feb 2013Cara Tooher
Why are we seeing the ageing population as purely a problem and not an opportunity? Read more of Jeremy's insight printed in yesterday's Evening Standard - http://bit.ly/Y8qtqs.
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