In Southwark and across the country people are living longer. In the 1850s most people in Britain barely made it past their fortieth birthday. Fast-forward to today and life expectancy has doubled to over eighty. It’s an incredible achievement that we should celebrate much more, writes Cllr Kieron Williams…
However, we must not rest on our laurels. Our success in adding years to life has created a new challenge for us to solve. How can we best provide the care that so many of us will now need as we live on into our seventies, eighties, nineties and beyond?
This month the government announced their long overdue response to this question. It’s over two years since the prime minster stood on the steps of Downing Street and announced he would “fix the crisis in social care once and for all, with a clear plan we have prepared” so you would have been forgiven for expecting some real improvements. Sadly, that was not to be.
Underneath the headlines there were no answers to the real issues most families face. No plan to drive up the quality of care. No plan to help millions of people who need care but are not currently eligible to get help from the state.
The prime minister’s plan also fails to provide the funding social care so urgently needs. For the next three years almost all of the money announced will go to the NHS and experts have cast doubt on whether much of it will every go towards providing better quality social care.
Worse still the prime minister’s plan is deeply unfair. With low paid working people hardest hit, while the wealthiest pay less. Take large private landlords for example. They will pay no more tax on the often sky-high rents paid to them by their tenants, while their tenants will see their personal tax bill rise. When you add together the impact of the prime minister’s tax rise with the government’s plan to cut Universal Credit, the very lowest paid workers will lose almost £1,300 a year. At a time when so many low paid workers are struggling to put food on the table that cannot be right.
In Southwark we have taken a very different approach, focussing on making the real and practical changes that will improve care for those who need it.
In 2018, we adopted the Ethical Care Charter for those receiving care at homes. This ensured that no home care visit would last less than 30 minutes and that staff have better training and a real Living Wage. The impact has been profound. With residents’ satisfaction with the service rising from just over 50% to over 90%. Now we are expanding that work with a new Residential Care Charter, to improve care for people in nursing and care homes too. As well as building a brand new state of the art nursing home near Burgess Park.
Even at the height of the pandemic, we had to make our own way. With the government repeatedly changing its position on PPE and failing to make adequate plans to supply care homes, Southwark Council had to step in to provide our own PPE to local care homes. Then we went above and beyond, providing a hub to get PPE to care homes across the city too.
In each case we have acted because we know how important high quality care is to local people. Every family should have access to affordable and dignified support as they get older. With people living so much longer we urgently need a national plan to provide that care for all who need it. A plan that increases funding, quality and access and a plan that is fair, with the wealthy paying their fair share. Sadly, the prime minister’s plan fails on every test.