A much bigger story than Rachel Reeves cancelling the winter fuel payment is her announcement today that she is finally killing off the beleaguered cap on social care costs.
Reeves told the Commons that the Conservative government had not funded its reforms to social care, so they weren’t going to happen. She said:
Adult social care was also neglected by the previous government. The sector needs reform to improve care and to support staff. In the previous parliament, the government made costly commitments to introduce adult social care charging reforms, but they delayed them two years ago because they knew that local authorities were not ready and that their promises were not funded, so it will not be possible to take forward those charging reforms. This will save over £1 billion by the end of next year.
There were angry shouts of ‘outrageous!’ from MPs on the opposition benches, and Reeves responded that ‘I can understand why people, and members, are angry’. They probably weren’t surprised, though: that cap on care costs of £86,000 was due to come into effect next year, but has been in gestation since 2011, when Andrew Dilnot’s Commission on Funding of Care and Support reported. It suggested a cap on lifetime contributions of between £25,000 to £50,000. This was then raised by the government to £72,000, and was supposed to come into effect in 2016. It was repeatedly delayed, with Conservative ministers privately making clear that the cap had long been dead.
The only surprise, really, is that Labour bothered to pretend it would revive it. Wes Streeting said during the election campaign that the party was ‘committed to… the cap on care costs’ – though that commitment wasn’t in the party’s manifesto. What the manifesto did commit to was a national care service, something Labour ministers have said they are working on since coming into government – though that commitment is also worryingly distant-sounding: ‘we will build consensus for the longer-term reform needed to create a sustainable National Care Service’. All the signs have been that the Labour government will use the old device of cross-party talks and maybe some kind of commission to build this ‘consensus’. Neither of these are needed: you cannot build consensus between parties that have fundamentally different ideas about the role of the state and private wealth, and there have been enough commissions over the decades to provide all the possible permutations of reform that any government could need to choose from: it just needs to choose.
Streeting was sitting on the frontbench next to Reeves today, presumably to underline that the announcements relating to his brief were something he had signed up to. Not only is social care reform being kicked into grass so long it resembles a rewilding experiment, the hospital building programme is also under threat. Reeves said the previous government had offered ‘false hope’ on this and that there would be a ‘complete review of the new hospital programme, with a thorough, realistic and costed timetable for delivery’.
Again, it is not a surprise that a hospital building programme that was largely based on the Boris Johnson fiction of ‘40 new hospitals’ (many of them were new units on existing estates) would be trashed by an incoming Labour government. The Health Secretary had already told the Commons that he would be reviewing the programme. But Streeting also made very clear in the run-up to this election that he was very worried about the quality of the NHS estate. Hospital buildings are famously crumbling: the health secretary has previously boasted that he is always keen to show Reeves around hospitals to make the case to her for capital investment. He is going to have to keep making that case for a good while longer.
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