Hurry along slowly on social care

As the Government at last launches its green paper with proposals on fixing the care system, Peter White says it’s been too long coming

It would be interesting to know how governments define the word urgent. Judging from experience, it only has one true criterion – something that might lose them an election! Eighteen months ago, You and Yours on Radio 4 ran a whole season of features pointing out the extreme urgency of reforming Britain’s social care system.

Eighteen months before that, Sir Derek Wanless produced a report for the health think-tank the King’s Fund, which pointed out that our social care system was broke (in both senses of the word), and urgently needed fixing. He proposed some kind of system based on partnership, funding from both the individual and the state and a recognition that social care should be a universal entitlement, not something which local councils funded if they happened to have enough money left over. In other words, a system which looked much more like the health service.

Even Wanless can hardly claim to have been a revolutionary. Demographers have been warning us since the 1960s that we had a problem, based on the inevitability that as people lived longer, we’d have a chronic imbalance between those who could work to support  those who couldn’t. But did we do anything about it, as the oil revenues rolled in, and cats got fatter by the minute? No, we didn’t! We waited for meltdown.

The problem for disabled people is that the system designed to help us, is the same one that’s supposed to carry the weight of the demographic time bomb, and clearly, it can’t. So has the current Government cottoned on to the fact that this is an urgent problem? Well, it says it has; successive social care ministers trooped into our studios to say they had. Even the prime minister said he had.

And the response to this “urgent” problem – a green paper, which has taken another 18 months to produce, and so far as I can see, marches us yet again through the possible options; those very same options that Wanless, You and Yours, and various other social thinkers, have already set out.

And even now that we have a green paper, we’re going to have another 16 weeks of consultation, followed by a white paper, when we might finally find out what the Government proposes to do about it.

By which time, of course, they could afford to be deliciously radical, since it seems unlikely that they will be required to provide delivery. That’ll be the new lot.