Care England responds to the Prime Minister’s social care speech and cross-party talks

Care England, the largest and most diverse representative body for independent adult social care providers in England, has responded to Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s speech today in which he placed social care as a priority for his premiership and called for a new kind of politics built around “problem-solving, not point-scoring”. Speaking alongside Baroness Louise Casey, who used the occasion to launch her Big Conversation on Care, the Prime Minister described the decades in which Westminster judged social care as too politically dangerous and too complicated to reform as a major dereliction of public duty, and he invited the leaders of the two main opposition parties to meet him so that the work of reform can begin on a cross-party footing.

Professor Martin Green OBE, Chief Executive of Care England, said:

“Care England warmly welcomes a Prime Minister who has chosen to spend the second week of his premiership standing in a care home and telling the country that social care matters, because a sector that had grown used to being an afterthought in Westminster has noticed the change in tone and has allowed itself to hope again. We said as much only yesterday when we published our Two Years of Promises scorecard, which graded the last government’s record against its own manifesto at C minus, or, in the language our member care services are judged in every day – ‘requires improvement’. What will decide whether this becomes the turning point the sector needs is the substance of the delivery that follows. Our members will want to know what will this look like and how it will be funded, and they will rightly want to see the ambition set out today matched by the money to deliver it before they can really believe that meaningful change is on the way.”

Alongside his appeal for consensus, the Prime Minister asked Baroness Casey to bring forward the conclusion of her Independent Commission on Adult Social Care to 2027 so that its recommendations for a National Care Service can begin to take shape within this Parliament. Burnham also devoted a substantial part of his speech to the workforce, praising the Fair Pay Agreement legislated for by his predecessor as a “building block” for the reform he envisages and saying that he would look at how it could be turned into something more ambitious, asking his ministers to consider bringing the pay, progression and conditions of care workers into line with those of the NHS, and telling the audience that the people who provide care should be among the best paid in society rather than the worst.

Professor Martin Green continued:

“We have argued from the outset that a Fair Pay Agreement worth the name has to be funded in full and honoured by those who commission care, and so the Prime Minister’s ambition to lift care workers towards parity with the NHS is the kind of ambition the sector has long been waiting to hear, provided the funding is found to make it real. The £500m attached to the agreement so far is dwarfed by the £1.4bn that our Silent Pay Cut research shows frozen tax thresholds will take out of care workers’ pay packets over the coming years, and, as we warned in our response to the government’s own consultation, there is no legal duty on councils to fund the wages the agreement will require providers to pay, so there is a serious and unaddressed risk that employers will be exposed to obligations their commissioners are under no duty to support them to meet. If the government binds commissioners to fund adequately what it asks providers to deliver, it will have our wholehearted support, and we stand ready to help ministers understand the sums involved and the mechanisms that would make a funded agreement work in practice.”

The Prime Minister also used his speech to ask politicians and the press to resist the temptation to reduce a serious question to a slogan, and Care England shares that concern, because the history of social care reform is in large part a history of sound proposals killed by framing and messaging, rather than on their substance.
With a national conversation now under way, the sector has a strong interest in that conversation being conducted in good faith by everyone who takes part in it.

Professor Martin Green concluded:

“This is a rare and valuable moment, and the worst thing that could happen to it is a return to the sloganeering that has stalled reform for the better part of two decades, so my appeal to every party coming to the table, and to all who report on their proposals, is to treat these issues with the seriousness they deserve and to let the public join the conversation before the answers are shouted down. Making a success of reform this time must involve co-production with the care providers who have held services together despite dwindling funding. Any reform that fails to support the small businesses providing this service and growing the economy in every locality is bound to collapse before it begins, whereas one built on working alongside the people who deliver care will not. We have invited the Prime Minister to work with the sector and help us clear the funding and workforce hurdles that stand between our joint ambition and its delivery. Social care has waited long enough for its moment and so have the people it exists to serve.”