By Lucy Phillips
11 March 2010
Hopes of reaching a political consensus on elderly care funding before the election have been dashed.
Fresh rows broke out between the three main parties at a summit convened by the charity Age Concern & Help the Aged on March 10, expected to be the final opportunity for a cross-party deal before the general election.
Council chiefs, social care experts and service users called for unity ahead of the talks, which were organised on the back of a Department of Health summit last month. That event had been boycotted by the Conservatives in protest at the government’s proposal for a compulsory levy, which could be taken from a person’s estate after death. The Tories, who dubbed this proposal a ‘death tax’, favour a one-off voluntary insurance payment on retirement.
Andrew Harrop, director of policy and public affairs for Age Concern & Help the Aged, told Public Finance that there was ‘continuing disagreement’ over the compulsory or voluntary options at the March 10 meeting, with Health Secretary Andy Burnham and his shadow counterpart Andrew Lansley ‘really not moving on’.
But he denied the talks had been a waste of time. Harrop said maintaining the debate was keeping up ‘momentum and commitment’, making ‘reform of some shape or size’ more likely later in the year. ‘It’s just too close to an election and it got too political for them to have an adult conversation about which funding model to go for. They have got to be politicians and repeat the party line,’ he said.
Harrop added that the charity preferred Labour’s proposals, all of which involve a basic level of state-funded care, but would rather see the Tory model ‘with good services than a poorly funded comprehensive’ model.
Speaking at a King’s Fund event on March 10, shadow health minister Stephen O’Brien said an all-party consensus ‘sounds cosy and is a way of making no decisions happen’. But he later admitted Labour’s recent green paper on social care reform was ‘a good basis for producing a consensus’.
11 March 2010
Hopes of reaching a political consensus on elderly care funding before the election have been dashed.
Fresh rows broke out between the three main parties at a summit convened by the charity Age Concern & Help the Aged on March 10, expected to be the final opportunity for a cross-party deal before the general election.
Council chiefs, social care experts and service users called for unity ahead of the talks, which were organised on the back of a Department of Health summit last month. That event had been boycotted by the Conservatives in protest at the government’s proposal for a compulsory levy, which could be taken from a person’s estate after death. The Tories, who dubbed this proposal a ‘death tax’, favour a one-off voluntary insurance payment on retirement.
Andrew Harrop, director of policy and public affairs for Age Concern & Help the Aged, told Public Finance that there was ‘continuing disagreement’ over the compulsory or voluntary options at the March 10 meeting, with Health Secretary Andy Burnham and his shadow counterpart Andrew Lansley ‘really not moving on’.
But he denied the talks had been a waste of time. Harrop said maintaining the debate was keeping up ‘momentum and commitment’, making ‘reform of some shape or size’ more likely later in the year. ‘It’s just too close to an election and it got too political for them to have an adult conversation about which funding model to go for. They have got to be politicians and repeat the party line,’ he said.
Harrop added that the charity preferred Labour’s proposals, all of which involve a basic level of state-funded care, but would rather see the Tory model ‘with good services than a poorly funded comprehensive’ model.
Speaking at a King’s Fund event on March 10, shadow health minister Stephen O’Brien said an all-party consensus ‘sounds cosy and is a way of making no decisions happen’. But he later admitted Labour’s recent green paper on social care reform was ‘a good basis for producing a consensus’.
He also accused Prime Minister Gordon Brown of ‘riding cart and horses’ through the principles set out in the paper with Labour’s ‘knee-jerk’ free personal care at home Bill, which ‘could absorb all the money’.
The health select committee published a report on March 12 calling for an all-party consensus early in the next Parliament and an end to ‘political point-scoring’. Chair Kevin Barron said: ‘We don’t want this issue to be turned into an election football for it to be kicked back into the long grass again in a few weeks.' The MPs also condemned the care Bill as ‘smacking of policy making on the hoof’, and said it was at risk of being ‘substantially underfunded’.
