Labour conference: Funding of care and support is ‘at top of agenda’

The funding of care and support for disabled and older people is now firmly at “the top of the political agenda”, according to Labour’s former health secretary.

Andy Burnham told a Labour conference fringe event organised by the Care and Support Alliance that he was “unshakeable” in his view that there needed to be a “National Care Service” to run alongside the National Health Service.

Burnham said such a service should be free at the point of use and that funding it through a “care levy” on people’s estates after they die – an idea attacked by the Conservatives before the election – was “the fairest way to reform social care”.

And he said it was “wonderful” that the new Labour leader, Ed Miliband, had said that a National Care Service was an idea that he wanted to explore.

Shadow health minister Barbara Keeley told another conference fringe event that spending cuts would lead to most councils restricting care only to those with “critical needs”.

She said local authorities were tightening eligibility, cutting services and introducing higher charges. She added: “In some cases, all of these are happening.”

Richard Howitt MEP, Labour’s spokesman on disability in the European parliament, said some people had warned that social care would be “reduced to an emergency service”.

Meanwhile, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) said this week that it had closed eight agencies providing care and support in people’s homes, and 34 care homes, in the last year.

In six cases, CQC issued a legal notice to close the service. In the other cases, the owners closed or sold the service following CQC enforcement action.

Problems included verbal and psychological abuse of service-users, poor hygiene and a lack of medical and nursing care.

Another 51 services – including 11 agencies providing care in people’s homes and one agency providing nursing care – closed after the CQC rated them as “poor” and demanded improvement.

The CQC’s new registration system launches this week (1 October) for adult social care services, and includes new “essential standards of quality and safety”.

The commission said this system would be “even tougher on poor care, with a wider range of enforcement powers”, including on-the-spot fines, warning notices and suspension of registration, as well as prosecution and closure.

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

Social care funding bill ‘within two years’

The government is hoping to introduce new laws to reform the funding of adult social care and support within two years, the Department of Health (DH) has confirmed.

The government had already said it would set up an independent commission to find a “sustainable” way to reform social care funding. But it has now made it clear how quickly it plans to move.

The DH said it hoped to publish a white paper on care and support reform in the autumn of 2011, with new legislation following in the next Queen’s speech, likely to be in November 2011.

A DH spokeswoman said she could not yet say whether there would be any disabled people on the commission, only that its membership would be decided “as soon as possible”.

She also confirmed that no funding options had yet been ruled out, but that the commission would be “asked to offer advice, rapidly, on a sustainable structure of funding for long-term care”.

The DH also confirmed that Labour’s Personal Care at Home Act (PCHA) would not come into force. The act would have provided free personal care at home to people with the highest needs.

Anne Kane, policy manager for Inclusion London, said that government talk of “painful and deep spending cuts” conflicted with the urgent need for a high quality, national system of social care that respected choice and control, and that such talk was “inevitably fuelling worry about the future”.

She said ministers’ emphasis on the need for a “sustainable” system implied low public spending, while Inclusion London wanted to see a system that was “available to all regardless of income and respects independence and human rights”.

And she said Inclusion London “deeply regretted” that the government was scrapping the PCHA, which “would have provided some care at home for people in desperate need”.

Neil Coyle, director of policy for Disability Alliance, said implementation of any new system was unlikely before 2014, while the economic climate and government budget restrictions would mean disabled people “continue to lose support and experience isolation and exclusion to an even greater degree”.

Coyle said there was widespread agreement among disabled people’s organisations and other campaigners that action was “needed soon”, and that the “simplest solution” would be a National Care Service funded through general taxation.

He said implementing the PCHA would have been “hugely welcome” if tied to “genuine resources”, and that “not providing free personal care at home will continue to harm disabled people and their families and push many families into poverty”.

News provided by John Pring