It is not surprising that the Government has delayed any meaningful decisions on social care reform for at least three years. It is also not surprising that ministers have tried to suggest they are busier than they are in getting to a solution to the long-burning crisis by setting up cross party talks. Both have been in the offing for a good while. What is remarkable about the announcement of yet another commission on reforming care for the elderly and disabled is that Baroness Louise Casey has agreed to lead it.
The crossbench peer, who has been tsaring for successive governments over the past 20 years, is not someone who likes messing about. She said last year that she would work for Keir Starmer if he gave her something where she could “get something done”. Her refusal to be messed about with is what makes her appealing to ministers, especially ones who actually want to get something done. But given there doesn’t seem to be a huge inclination to get the thing done in the case of social care, it is surprising Casey wants to go anywhere near this review.
To be fair to the peer, she will be producing an interim report on medium-term reforms in 2026, with her final recommendations on long-term measures not due until 2028. At least she has a chance to push ministers to get going with something next year – and they will know that she will either walk away or attack them in public if those medium term ideas aren’t acted on quickly.
The Prime Minister has long admitted when pushed that full reform of social care would not come until the second term of a Labour Government, and if he insists on sticking to that then the best to hope for is that medium-term changes are better than nothing. Ministers are also pointing out that they are already pursuing reform on better pay for social care workers in order to make the sector a more attractive place to work, which is no small matter given the turnover and shortages in many care homes and agencies.
They also say they are “harnessing the power of care technology”, the sort of sentence you would only ever get on a Government press release. In fact, in the same sentence, the Government actually says it will “transform care” and be “cutting red tape”, almost a full house in political communications bingo.
Friday’s announcement of Casey’s commission also included more funding – £86m – for the disabled facilities grant, which enables people to live independently in their existing homes for longer by installing ramps, stairlifts and other adaptations. As well as allowing older people to stay where they want to live, safer homes also prevent hospital admissions, so this is not insignificant given the Government wants to move to a more preventive model of care.
But that’s enough of being fair to Louise Casey, because this week the Government has confirmed that it doesn’t want to get things done on social care, really, and that it’s perfectly happy to have an entire electoral cycle of drift on the overall question of funding and standards. Casey will be reporting at the very time when the parties are at their least amenable to agreeing to anything, something we already know because all cross-party attempts to find a consensus on social care reform have ended in nothing other than a bunch of cross parties accusing one another of blowing the talks up.
There is no obvious appetite from any of the major political players to do anything other than conform to the pattern of their predecessors: use one of a number of unpalatable options for reform as a stick with which to beat their opponents.
That’s the problem with social care reform – none of the options are low cost or low effort, whether you believe in a high level of state intervention and therefore higher taxes, or whether you think it is better organised in a more atomised way.
If there was an easier solution, a government would have adopted it by now. Casey is impressive, but the chances of her finding the one proposal that makes this easy and the sort of thing that voters aren’t going to get annoyed about are rather slim. We have all the proposals that any government needs: what is and has been lacking for years is one with the mettle to get on with it.
Starmer might not be having the easiest start to Government, but this is the most powerful he will ever be in terms of the Parliamentary arithmetic for legislating on yet another set of proposals. By the time Casey reports, he will have to answer questions on why he squandered the opportunity to really get things done when he had it.