Funding Britain’s Future Needs
How can we fund Britain's Social Care Demand?
Author: Roberta Blackman-Woods MP, Paul Burstow MP, Chris Skidmore MP |
FUNDING BRITAIN’S FUTURE NEEDS
HOW CAN WE FUND BRITAIN’S SOCIAL CARE DEMAND?
Localis latest Policy Platform includes a cross-party collection of essays, from Paul Burstow MP, Chris Skidmore MP, and Roberta Blackman-Woods MP, which calls for urgent debate and innovative new policy solutions to an impending care funding crisis.
The contributors propose a range of possible solutions including care insurance schemes, ‘care ISAs’, the expansion of preventative care, to help both the individual authors as a way of both helping individuals and the country, tackling what will be a £16.5bn a year care funding gap by 2020 according to the LGA.
Ahead of the Budget announcement and on the day the Joint Committee on the draft Care and Support Bill publishes its unanimously agreed report into improvements to the government’s plans for social care reform (a committee chaired by Paul Burstow), which also calls for the Government to ‘take stock of its funding for adult care and support’, Localis’ pamphlet adds to the growing weight of opinion calling for radical change.
Alex Thomson, Chief Executive of Localis said:
“With social care costs expected to eat up all local government spend other than the waste budget by the end of the decade, it’s hard to understate the scale of the problem. But the answer cannot be to simply channel endless billions into filling a bottomless financial pit.”
Paul Burstow MP, former Care Services Minister, said:
“Even with the cap on costs and the protection that it will offer, there is more to do if social care is to be moved from the critical list.”
Chris Skidmore MP, member of the Health Select Committee, said:
“The answer here is not simply to throw more money at the problem or to ring fence budgets. The only way to ensure that funds are directed the right way is to give control to those who receive care.”
Roberta Blackman-Woods, Shadow Minister for Communities and Local Government, said:
“What I find truly refreshing in [Andy Burnham MP’s] approach is the recognition that local government through its strategic oversight (for the time being at least) of housing, education, leisure, planning, employment and economic development can influence the determinants of health at a much wider level.”