Dear Sir – Your editorial on social care as an election issue (4 June):
As reported in your editorial this week, the LibDems have opened the batting, now, on social care as an election issue.
Ministers and MPs from other parties seem determinedly uninterested in the topic. Helen Whately’s incantations of the drip-fed funds that have had to be injected back into the sector by government, as mere plasters for specific pressures, are simply trotted out again.
I appreciate that the electoral jeopardy implicit in the care costs cap makes it a toxic subject for ill-informed politicians or exhausted journalists whose editors want sound-bites. But there’s something much easier for the public to grasp, care about and raise with their local candidates – the fact is that we are witnessing the end of individual, enforceable legal rights to a social work and social services safety net – sleepwalking towards it – and it is already affecting all of us.
It is difficult to work out if this unravelling of respect for law and legal principle, plus any apparent means to call it out, and put a stop to it, is collusion or coincidence.
Nobody ever asks whether the Commissioners who are sometimes sent in by government, after a council issues a s114 notification, know the first thing about the nature of the legal duties that become theirs to discharge.
Croydon (where there is government-imposed scrutiny designed to hasten a return to solvency) has even managed, recently, to pull off a breach of Article 3 Human Rights, in the context of social services – quite a feat, in legal terms, and one which screams lack of legal literacy and an absence of a governance culture or respect for accountability.
Nobody writes about the effect on the rule of law, within the public sector, of both affordable legal advice and access to legal remedies becoming out of reach to the very people owed the duties.
No journalist ever asks Directors what the consequences for them, or for government, should be, if they cannot meet the needs assessed as eligible – the core duty in the Care Act. This highlights just how far our national ‘ennui’ has developed.
The government knows that 78% of rejected complaints which go forward to the Ombudsman and are investigated, are upheld. What that says about legal illiteracy within council’s senior management teams is not printable.
The Equalities and Human Rights Commission and the House of Lords Select Committee delivered their separate verdicts on the remedies issue, and lack of means to challenge arbitrary decision-making about care packages last year, but both bodies of work have also been ignored.
A legal aid law firm gets £270 odd for up to 7 hours work, if offering Legal Help in the Community Care field, which means that there is now a well-documented advice desert. The Ministry of Justice knows of the legal advice desert but simply commissions new surveys that do nothing to alter the fact that community care legal expertise is withering away. This means that councils can ignore the law with impunity.
And thus the ‘duty’ which Directors say they are concerned that they will not be able to discharge, ceases to have any meaning at all, for disabled and chronically ill people, whilst their largely female informal carers feel they have no option other than to give up their own lives and jobs to care for their relatives.
The impact of austerity in the context of funding for delivering the legal framework for the social care safety net, and legal advice to challenge indefensibly underfunded care packages, suggests that there may be a central government determination to make people fund their own care needs.
Councils go on about profiteering by providers, when it is councils’ own unregulated dominant purchasing power that has been used to suppress the rate being paid TO providers, since the 1990s, unless a provider has stood its ground. A case decided this week declared that ‘nobody piped up’, to warn the council that its fee rates made the market unsustainable – they signed up, instead, evidencing their willingness to do the job for less than they think it is worth.
Ensuring there is no money for buying services to which the person in need is entitled, covertly prevents the social care workforce, largely female and un-unionised, from asserting its true power in the market.
So, the lack of any practicable means for people to enforce their rights under the Care Act is not inconvenient to government – any government, perhaps, of any persuasion.
The truth may be that the current government, which has infamously chosen to pay Special Advisors to think outside normative public sector values, is experimenting to see if a whole area of legal rights and legal expertise can be killed off, just by turning off the tap, over time.
Social work and social care policy actually offers any party, faced with a demographic dilemma, an exciting strategic challenge, regardless of whether the financial services sector wants ‘in’, with regard to products that will pay out for whatever sum is ultimately built into the care costs cap. The country just needs social services policy leadership and acumen order to take up that challenge.
If this doesn’t emerge, the subliminal message from birth onwards will soon become ‘England needs Women to Care’ – so that the rest of us do not have to pay more tax. If Labour defers social care as an issue until a third year in office, or even a second term, the lot of women in this country will have been put back about 50 years, simply through inaction and lack of serious media attention.
It needs that attention, much sooner than that, from us all.
Yours faithfully,
Belinda Schwehr
CASCAIDr CIC