Newly-installed Labour prime minister Andy Burnham told the BBC that ‘the NHS will collapse’ if social care is not reformed before adding that he was unable to put a timeline on any reform of the social care system.
Unlike the NHS, social care is not free at the point of use but is in the hands of private companies who charge up to £45 an hour for home visits and exorbitant amounts for residential care.
The social care system in England operates as a two-tier system with those with care needs either paying the full cost or, in the case of those with assets below £23,250, receiving state support from their local authority.
With local authorities increasingly finding their cash stretched to the limit, the barriers to people getting the money to pay for the care from private providers has been increased to catastrophic levels.
Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of the healthcare think tank the Kings Fund, told the BBC that the current ‘punitive system’ meant that ‘quite a lot of people go without the care they need’ with one in seven paying out over £100,000 for social care.
With the private companies – the majority owned by international hedge funds – only interested in profit the effect on the elderly has been catastrophic.
Care homes in the poorer areas of England have been shut down as cash-strapped councils are unable to meet the costs demanded by the privateers while home assistance has been cut to the extent that hundreds of thousands of the elderly are forced to rely on unpaid carers, usually family members.
The cost to the NHS of picking up the pieces from this catastrophe is pushing the health service over the precipice. This leaves open the question of where are the reforms Burnham is promising coming from?
The Health Foundation think tank has estimated that turning the social care system into a free-at-the-point-of-delivery like the NHS would cost an extra £18.7 billion a year by 2035.
With Burnham ruling out tax increases and promising strict adherence to the previous fiscal rules of the former chancellor Rachel Reeves, the only option to finding this money is through cuts to the welfare state. In the same interview Burnham made clear that he is plotting a return to the plans of the previous Labour administration of Keir Starmer to cut benefits for the sick and disabled, with youth especially targeted.
Burnham announced a crackdown on youth sickness benefits to pay for his proposed spending on social care and, more immediately, on handing out billions to the defence industry and military.
Under Burnham’s plans, youth will face having their sickness benefits stopped unless they agree to do ‘training’ or ‘voluntary work’.
The only difference between Starmer’s plan to drive the sick and disabled off benefits and back to seeking non-existent jobs is the words used by Burnham to justify this latest attack designed to slash the benefits bill to provide the billions demanded by the military.
He avoided damning the sick claiming benefits as being workshy, instead, he sanctimoniously said there are people on benefits ‘young people in their 20s, who have been, I would say, quite seriously let down because the support wasn’t there for them when it should have been.’
Cutting off the benefits that keep tens of thousands of sick and ill people from starvation-level poverty in order to finance imperialist war in Ukraine is Burnham’s idea of support.
The working class and youth revolted against Starmer’s earlier attempts to make the most vulnerable pay for the capitalist crisis, and they will not be fooled by Burnham.
Having dumped Starmer, the immediate issue is for the working class to demand the TUC call a general strike to dump Burnham and the Labour government, replacing it with a workers government – a workers government that will nationalise the banks and major industries along with the private social care companies, placing them under the management of the working class as part of a socialist planned economy.
This is the way forward.
