Social care

As if Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and other places were not enough, last week we had another local authority child sex abuse scandal, this time from Lambeth. The child sex abuse inquiry’s damning report concluded that for years councillors and local authority managers in the borough were too indolent, too concerned with politics, and at times too compromised with local pressure groups, to take steps to protect some of the most vulnerable children in their care. The sufferers, as ever, were the children. Meetings, inquiries and promises to do better from Lambeth and other councils up and down the kingdom are a certainty. But it may be time for some more

‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won,’ wrote the Duke of Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo. This sentiment, rather than any form of triumphalism, is what Tory whips should feel after winning the vote on the government’s decision to reduce spending on foreign aid from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.5. The vote is a sign of the battles to come in the rest of this parliament. The government put its authority on the line in the Commons debate. The Prime Minister opened it, the Chancellor closed it. The government also offered something of a concession, a pledge to return to

Effective cabinet ministers are ones who work out what they want to do in a department on arrival, and then stick to that very small set of priorities whatever the political winds and storms. Michael Gove had this approach in the Education department, setting himself three priorities and then focusing on getting them delivered. Not only did he then replicate this approach in his subsequent Whitehall briefs, but he also inspired other ministers to do the same. Jeremy Hunt, who largely modelled himself on Gove when he became health secretary, also gave himself a small list of things he wanted to do in his time overseeing that brief. Now, it

If social care reform were any deeper in the long grass of political priorities, it’d probably get mistaken for a hedgerow. It got a one-line reference in the Queen’s Speech this week, which does not even guarantee that the ‘clear plan’ promised by the PM in his first speech in the job will be published this year. Announcing ‘a long-term plan for social care reform this year’ has been a quaint annual government ritual since 2017. The Queen’s Speech also mentioned the need to clear the NHS backlog. Delays for treatment, already widespread before Covid-19 due to a decade of NHS funding increases lagging behind demand, are now the worst since

Is the government ever going to reform social care? After a lengthy row between No. 10 and the Treasury, the Queen’s speech does include a promise that ‘proposals on social care reform will be brought forward.’ The stand-off wasn’t just over how much those proposals will cost, but the design itself. Perhaps this is why the briefing accompanying the speech is so very light on what the government plans to do. All we know is that the Health and Care Bill ‘will include provisions to improve the oversight of how social care is commissioned and delivered, and facilitate greater integration between health and care services by placing Integrated Care Systems

Labour’s Liz Kendall is today calling for the government to treat social care in the same way as it treats physical infrastructure. In a speech this afternoon, the shadow care minister said that ‘in the century of ageing, social care is as much a part of our economic infrastructure as the roads and the railways’. This is quite a challenging analogy, as the state of the social care sector would make even the most outdated and crumbling parts of the northern rail network look pretty luxurious and well-appointed. Kendall is also speaking as a battle rages within government over whether social care reform will make it into the Queen’s Speech.

Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. In politics, it’s more often than not the latter that matters most. Liz Kendall, star of my somewhat unsuccessful 2015 campaign to ‘Make Liz Kendall Labour Leader and Queen of Everything’, has been pilloried online for suggesting care workers would be ‘better off stacking shelves at Morrisons’ given their pay and conditions. Her remarks were pounced upon as proof of snobbery towards supermarket staff, a largely unacknowledged army of key workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. As ever with outrage rampages, the truth is a bit more prosaic. Here is Kendall’s question in full: ‘Despite repeated promises, the truth is

‘Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards — and good luck!’ Liam Byrne will forever be haunted by the note he left on his desk for his successor in 2010. Both coalition parties made much of what was supposed to be a joke about the difficulties of keeping Whitehall spending in check. David Cameron waved the note around in his victorious 2015 election campaign. Byrne later said he was so embarrassed by his mistake that he considered throwing himself off a cliff. There’s nothing funny about what Theresa May leaves on her desk for the next prime minister. Rather than just one pithy note, there’s a