Section:GDN 1N PaGe:11 Edition Date:190801 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 31/7/2019 19:17 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Thursday 1 August 2019 The Guardian •
11improved the system shows that
trying to reform social care can
prove treacherous. As Simon
Bottery, a senior fellow at the
King’s Fund thinktank, recalls:
“The Conservatives proposed a
‘cap and fl oor’ model. That would
have capped the amount someone
might have had to pay during their
lifetime for care and the fl oor would
have raised the amount of assets
that someone could have had – from
£23,250 to £100,000. That is, more
people would have been entitled to
free personal care.
“These proposals created
a political fi restorm for the
Conservatives. The public looked at
them and thought they weren’t very
generous and didn’t realise that they
were in fact more generous than the
current system. The Conservatives’
20-point polling lead shr ank to just
two points within days.”
That was largely because the
plans were widely labelled a
“dementia tax”. Critics asked: why
should someone with dementia have
to pay out huge sums in care costs,
and potentially even be forced to
sell their home to foot the bill, when
a cancer patient has all their care
provided free by the NHS? May’s
inability to answer that question
convincingly, and to persuade
people that her plans represented
progress towards a better social
care system, even after the belated
addition of a £100,000 cap on the
amount anyone would have to
spend, left them dead in the water.
Reforming the funding of social
care and deciding on eligibility for
free care “is the zombie of modern
policy debate, stumbling unsteadily
around in circles”, Bottery says. “It
has proven politically fraught since
1999, when the Labour government-
appointed Sutherland commission
recommended free personal care for
everyone with eligible needs in the
UK. Scotland brought it in but the UK
parliament rejected it for England
and Wales because of the cost
involved. Clearly the cost is a factor
in the government inaction we’ve
seen over the last 20 years.”
That is also why the green paper
on social care, fi rst due in 2017, has
still never been published.
Helen Buckingham, director
of strategy at the Nuffi eld Trust
thinktank, points out that while
spending £7bn a year on universal
free personal care system is not
cheap, it is but a mere fraction of
the NHS budget, which is due to hit
£148.5bn by 2023 -24. That would
arguably be £7bn well spent given
that inadequate social care costs the
Steven MorrisG
reg Collins, a 53-year-
old care worker , waved
off the bright turquoise
open-topped Brexit
party bus as it began
one of its fi nal grand
tours of the Brecon and Radnorshire
constituency and declared that
Nigel Farage’s candidate would be
getting his vote.
“I was a Labour supporter for a
long time but they have let us down- Tony Blair lied over the Iraq war,”
said Collins. “The Lib Dems helped
bring austerity on us so I won’t have
anything to do with them.”
And the Tories? Collins, it turns
out, was one of 150 or so people who
stood in the drizzle outside Brecon
Guildhall this week hoping to get a
glimpse of the new prime minister
when he visited mid-Wales before
today’s by election. But the crowd
was left disappointed, with Boris
Johnson making only a fl ying visit
to an enterprise park on the fringe
of the town rather than meeting and
greeting the voters.
“I was keen to see him and I’d
have liked to speak to him,” said
Collins. “I waited there for nearly
two hours and he didn’t turn up.
The common man gets stiff ed all the
time. I’m voting for Mr Farage this
time and if he turns out to be a liar,
I won’t vote again.”
In truth, the by election is just
about the last thing Johnson
needs. It is his fi rst major test as
prime minister and if, as is widely
expected, the Liberal Democrats
win , his working majority in the
Commons will be reduced to one.
The by election was called after
the sitting Conservative MP Chris
Davies was embroiled in an expenses
scandal that resulted in him being
ousted when more than 10% of the
registered voters signed a petition
to remove him. To the surprise of
many, Davies was re selected to fi ght
the by election for the Tories.
The Brexit p arty candidate, Des
Parkinson , a former police chief
superintendent, called the Tory
drove through Brecon town centre.
“They’re the sort that are here today,
gone tomorrow,” he said.
Agriculture has been at the centre
of this campaign with warnings of
heartache for sheep farmers and
even civil unrest if the UK leaves the
EU with no deal.
Les voted for remain and will
be backing the Lib Dems at the
byelection. “Boris is thinking he can
get a deal. I very much doubt he can.
With him in charge we’re heading for
a no deal. That’s a bad job for us. All
the work we’ve done will be undone.
It will mean a big adjustment.”
Three doors along from the Brexit
p arty offi ce, the Lib Dem HQ was
even more lively. The Lib Dems held
this seat between 1997 and 2015 and
believe they will win it back.
Candy Piercy had just arrived
from Buckinghamshire to help
the party’s candidate Jane Dodds.
A veteran of by elections up and
down the country, Piercy said she
was shocked the Tories had chosen
Davies to stand again. “I wonder if
it’s because they want to blame him
for losing it,” she said.
Kirsty Williams , the Lib Dem
Welsh assembly member for Brecon
and Radnorshire, said the campaign
was not just about farming and
Brexit. “People want to talk about
hundreds of diff erent things,” she
said. “Each doorstep conversation
can be very diff erent. Some people
are talking about Brexit. We’re a very
large farming industry. [A] no deal
would be catastrophic for our sheep
industry. Lamb and beef prices are
down already. Farmers are feeling
the strain. But when they are not
talking about Brexit they want to
talk about public expenditure, about
infrastructure, austerity and hyper-
local issues such as is the library
going to survive.”
Williams criticised Johnson’s
no-show in the town centre – a stark
contrast to the eff orts of the new
Lib Dem leader, Jo Swinson, who
has visited four times.
“Quite clearly this was a very
stage-managed visit with extensive
care taken to avoid scrutiny,” she
said. “In a constituency particularly
vulnerable to no-deal Brexit, local
people are right to expect the
Conservatives to explain why they
are pursuing it. The fact they shied
away speaks volumes.”
Davies, however, said he did not
regret standing. “The support I’ve
had from the people of Brecon and
Radnorshire has been immense,” he
said. “These aren’t just constituents.
They are former clients, friends,
family. It was they that encouraged
me to stand again.”
He said he had not meant to
commit an off ence over his expenses- which concerned the submitting
of fake invoices for nine framed
landscape photographs, costing
£700, for his offi ce in Builth Wells.
“ It was a pure mistake and I’ve
paid a heavy price.”
Asked whether he was sorry
for causing his new leaders such
a headache, he said: “There are
many things the prime minister will
have a headache over. I’m sure this
by election is one of them.”
Brecon and Radnorshire
Brexit party and Lib Dems
hope for byelection boost
decision to put Davies up again as
arrogant. “He’s doing the Tory cause
here no good.”
Activists for the Brexit p arty
have fl ooded in. Diana Coad
from Berkshire , a Tory defector ,
was running the buzzing Brecon
campaign offi ce yesterday – and
making sure those getting on the
bus had been to the toilet. “They’re
a smashing bunch. They come from
all over,” she said.
One absentee is Farage. The Brexit
p arty MEP Nathan Gill explained
that the leader was spending time
in the US “with his friend Donald
Trump” and also planning a much
larger campaign.
“We’re in general election mode,”
said Gill. “He’s got to make sure
we’re fi ghting fi t and ready for the
big one.” Gill said he thought there
would be a general election on
24 October. “Put a fi ver on it.”
Of course, not everyone was
impressed by the bright blue bus
and the Brexit p arty bluster. Les, a
sheep farmer, was taking his ease
in the sunshine when the vehicle The Brexit party takes its message
to Brecon town centre as the formerly
Tory seat prepares to vote today
PHOTOGRAPH: GARETH PHILLIPS/THE GUARDIAN‘I waited for two
hours and Johnson
didn’t turn up. The
common man gets
stiff ed all the time’Greg Collins, below
Care workerNHS billions because poorly cared-
for older people are more likely to
need hospital care.
So what are Johnson’s options
for reform? Free personal care may
appeal because of its growing cross-
party support, says Harry Quilter-
Pinner, a senior research fellow at
the IPPR. “Another alternative is
a more generous means test and
a cap on care costs as proposed in
the Conservatives’ 2017 manifesto.
This would guarantee that no one
would face catastrophic care cost
of £100,000 or more and would
be marginally cheaper than free
personal care at an additional £5bn
per annum by 2020-21. However, it is
regressive, with additional resources
primarily focused on protecting the
wealth of home owners.”
Buckingham adds: “One option
could be a compulsory insurance
scheme, as seen in Germany. Or we
could learn from Japan, which funds
its system through a mixture of
compulsory insurance payments for
those aged over 40. Another option
would be to simply fund it through
taxes, like the NHS.”
Under May the government was
understood to be keen on bringing
in a system of purely voluntary
insurance. While experts believed
that would leave too many people
still unable to cover care costs in old
age, Matt Hancock, the health and
social care secretary, believed that
it was the only scheme the Treasury
would back, given the cost of other,
more radical options.
However, Johnson is understood
to have taken voluntary insurance
off the table. Well-placed sources say
he has told Hancock to undertake
“a much more ambitious rethink”
of the proposals in the unpublished
green paper, and Sajid Javid, the
chancellor, to be prepared to put
signifi cant sums of government
money behind whatever solution
does fi nally emerge.
There are other problems in social
care too , including the closure of
care homes and more than 100,
vacancies in the workforce. But if
Johnson stays true to his ambitio n
then he may yet come up with a bold- and expensive – solution to th is
longest running of challenges.
Johnson has also pledged to help
the NHS. A speech in the next few
days is expected to fl esh out what he
told MPs last week would be plans
for “urgent funding for 20 hospital
upgrades and winter-readiness ...
[and] policy proposals for drastically
reducing waiting times and for GP
appointments”.
The increasingly decrepit state of
many hospitals has become a matter
of acute concern for NHS bosses,
with the bill for repairing crumbling
facilities now around £6bn. Years of
ministers diverting money from the
service’s capital budget into day-to-
day running costs have left it unable
to undertake even repairs that are
deemed a risk to staff and patient
safety.
Cutting waiting-times for NHS
treatment – in A&E and for GP
and cancer care and non-urgent
operations – is certainly a political
imperative. However, doing so will
not be easy, as the main problem is
the NHS’s chronic staff shortages,
the answer to which – experts say – is
more compl ex than throwing money
at the problem.
‘Theresa May’s social
care proposal was
a key reason for the
Conservative s’ loss
of their majority’Nick Davies, below
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