+ Social care funding: Is private sector pulling the strings?
Excellent article by Peter Beresford.
The political party conference season is almost upon us. Worryingly, this year it comes within the time frame of the public consultation over the future funding of social care. This is a contentious enough issue at the best of times. Social care has long been starved of adequate funding. As a result tighter and tighter means and needs tests have come to apply.
While a few people have been getting better, more flexible packages of support, many more are being denied the support that they need and far too many service users, particularly older people, are still ending up in institutional settings – despite all the evidence that these make it difficult to retain choice and control. Now with the credit crunch and predictions all round of greatly restricted public expenditure, the prospects for social care seem even more worrying.
Where is the balanced debate?
If ever there were a time when we needed balanced, well informed discussion about social care funding, then it is now. But already government has shown its reluctance to commit itself to this. While many of the people it consulted with in the run up to the Green Paper said they thought it should be paid for out of general taxation, like the NHS – and the authors of the Green Paper themselves concluded that this was probably the simplest and fairest approach to funding - this option is explicitly ‘ruled out’ in the published document. Such an exclusion hardly seems likely to encourage the wide and open public debate on the future of social care which government says it wants to foster.
What the government seems to be going for instead is some kind of ‘partnership’ funding arrangement which is likely to put more financial responsibility on the individual service user and increase the market opportunities for private insurance companies. There is a big irony here – as the US President Barack Obama seeks to stem the inefficiency and greed of US health insurance companies, here in the UK, we look like turning to just such companies to meet growing social care needs.
Opportunities for lobbying
Which brings us back to the party conference season. In recent years, across the major political parties these have become opportunities for lobbying and love fests between the private and state sectors at innumerable fringe and other meetings. This week Private Eye, reports one such event. It says:
Shadow health minister Stephen O’Brien will be discussing whether funding for long-term care should be by ‘individual, state or partnership’. The answer may well be by ‘partnership’ because the meeting is being paid for by Partnerships Assurance which specialises in funding elderly care through equity release and insurance schemes and so has a direct interest in less government funding for elderly care (Private Eye, No 1244, 4-17 September, p8).
Doubtless there will be equivalent meetings at the Liberal Democratic and Labour Party conferences. But where will the voice of older people and other social care service users be in this debate? And how will they match the big guns of the private sector organisations who can afford to wine, dine and set up their own high power discussions with government and shadow ministers? This bodes badly for the government’s green paper consultation, democracy and the future of social care. We will all of us have our work cut out trying to balance the scales of social justice here.