It is ‘perfectly feasible’ for the social care commission to report to the Prime Minister within a year, rather than the three years it’s been given, MPs were told in a Health and Social Care Committee (HSCC) session yesterday.
The independent commission, which was launched last week by the government, will be chaired by Baroness Louise Casey of Blackstock, and will look at how to rebuild the adult social care system.
The first phase of the commission it set to identify recommendations for improvement in the medium term. It will report in 2026. The second phase will look at longer-term reform and will report in 2028.
Speaking at the first evidence session of the HSCC’s inquiry on Adult Social Care Reform: The Cost of Inaction, Sir Andrew Dilnot, chair of the Commission on Funding of Care and Support, said three years was ‘an inappropriate length of time’.
He added that it was ‘perfectly feasible’ that the commission report by the end of the calendar year.
‘I’d certainly like to see it report earlier, and I very much hope that it will,’ said Sir Andrew. ‘I can’t think of any reason why it should take three years. I simply can’t.’
He said the commission he was part of, the Dilnot Commission which was tasked with assessing how to deliver a fair, affordable and sustainable funding system for social care in England, took a year from being commissioned to final reporting in 2011.
‘Three years seems to me an inappropriate length of time, and in particular, it gets us too close to the next election,’ he said. ‘Something else I have definitely learned is that to make a decision on this, it ideally is made in the first half of our parliament, because otherwise events get in the way.’
He added: ‘It’s perfectly feasible for the government to expect [the commission to report] by the end of this calendar year. By the end of 2025.’
MPs were also warned that if reform is not done, the government’s ability to deliver it’s three shift priorities, from hospital to community, sickness to prevention and analogue to digital, will be ‘massively’ impinged.
‘We have a massive number of people in hospital right now who don’t need to be there, and there are two categories of that group,’ he said.
These are patients who are in hospital, not due to a social care failing, but who cannot get out due to a lack of available social care, and those who are in hospital due to the failings of social care, according to Sir Andrew.
‘It’s a huge problem and challenge,’ he said.
Sir Andrew said the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer would be the ‘critical thing’ to ensure reform is done.
‘My experience and hypothesis is that to get something like this done, a Prime Minister has to be committed to it,’ he said.
‘On the two occasions where we’ve had legislation in the last 15 years, that’s where we got to, Lord Cameron became committed to this, and that’s how we got the [Care Act] legislation in 2014.
‘Mr. Johnson, criticized for many things, but in this area, Boris Johnson really did care about doing something about social care, and in the teeth of considerable opposition within his own party, because of that, something happened [the social care plan and Health and Social Care Levy].’
The 2014 Care Act passed legislation to introduce a cap on the amount of money paid by individuals for their care, which was a recommendation from the Dilnot report in 2011.
In the commission’s report, Sir Andrew proposed that the contribution individuals make towards the cost of their care should be capped at £35,000 and that eligibility criteria for services should be set nationally. The report also called for better integration between social care and other services, with a stronger emphasis on prevention.
However, the implementation of the Care Act was delayed and new proposals were put in place for a cap by Boris Johnson’s government that were due to start in October 2023. This was delayed until October 2025 but was then scrapped by chancellor Rachel Reeves in July in her spending review.
Kathryn Smith, chief executive at the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE), also warned MPs that failing to act to reform social care would have the most impact on those from marginalised communities.
‘Marginalised groups and people in deprived areas are disproportionately affected,’ she said.
MPs were told the ‘best argument’ for reform of the social care system was not that it would save money, as Sir Andrew said he was not sure it would in the long term. But that it would give people ‘more flourishing lives’ and ‘free up very significant NHS resources’.
‘At the moment we are putting an enormous and unnecessary strain on the NHS,’ said Sir Andrew.
Last week the government also pledged to develop a digital platform to share information between NHS and care staff and to fully digitise all care providers by the end of the Parliament.
