Who Cares?

Adam McQueen (0:00)

Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Andrew Hunter Murray (0:03)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94 My name's Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the Eyes News Studio with Helen Lewis and Adam McQueen. We're here to discuss all sorts of things that have been in the news since the last issue of the magazine. We are slap bang in the middle of the Labour Conference. We're recording this on Monday. So at the time you watched this, you may have just switched over from Andy Burnham's big speech. But one of the things he will be talking about is social care, which he has made an enormous part of his offer to the electorate, what he's trying to convince everyone that we really, really need to do something about social care.

Helen, why is this such a big thing for him?

Helen Lewis (0:38)

Well, he's been on this case since 2010 when he was a health minister under Gordon Brown. And if you remember, he got kind of shanked by the Cameron Osborne administration, who called it a death tax, his proposals back then. But he's always had this. When he was mayor of Manchester, he asked for the kind of latitude to try and try out some proposals in Manchester. I was on a panel with him. You remember that Labour conference where he was sort of seen as the coming man a couple of years ago, and he was going around in his little Fred Perry polo neck.

And I mean, that's sort of every Labour Party conference the last couple of years. And I made some sort of like slightly sad joke about the fact that obviously he tried this before, that Keir Starmer tried it. And, you know, it has been something he's been going on and on about for a really long time. I think given extra charge by the fact that his father died having suffered from Alzheimer's for many years not long ago.

Adam McQueen (1:22)

But it's also something that everyone has been talking about for a really long time. I mean, the general consensus, and it's as far as the consensus goes, for the last at least 15 years has been that something needs to be done about social care and something needs to be done. But there's absolutely no consensus on what that should be and it's literally at least two elections. So the 2010 one when it was branded by by other parties as the death tax, the 2017 one when Theresa May tried to come up with a solution for it in her manifesto, it was branded as a dementia tax, wasn't it? So it's one of those things that everyone can agree that something needs to be done on but no one can agree quite what.

Andrew Hunter Murray (1:54)

The problem is there's a big division between healthcare, NHS care and social care. So I actually re-listened to an episode we did of Page 94 in 2015, where I was talking to Phil Hammond and Heather Mills. Both of them were saying, this has been a problem for a really long time. We really need to get a grip on this. As far as I can tell, almost nothing has changed in the time since we recorded that episode. So that has had an impact on millions of families, millions of elderly people who are spending all their money on care that is not state-provided, people who are selling their homes, families who are having to give up all of their time and become unpaid carers, and the state is really relying on their goodwill and the fact that people like caring for their families and they feel the need urgently to do it. But this is not a sensible way to run a system. So the basic problem is one about the division between health care and social care.

If you have cancer, for example, and you need help with various things after, as part of your recovery, maybe that's being visited at home, whether that's getting up in the morning or getting dressed or maybe some meals cooking. If you've had cancer, that might well come from the NHS budget, and you will probably get that, right? Because that's central government funding. If you have, let's say, dementia, that funding is supposed to come from the social care budget, which your local council administers, and councils are so strapped for cash, as you say, that there might well not be that money there. It's very, very hard to get social funding, so lots of people simply pay for it themselves, and get through all of their money right down to the last. It's £23,250.

Once your assets shrink to that level, the state steps in, but it's a complete lottery as to whether you get care or don't. It's an insane way to run a system, and yet it's just been relied on because the alternatives, apparently suggesting more tax to pay for it, immediately the other side will always brand it a death or a dementia tax. It's mad.