When voters go to the polls in May’s local elections and contests for the Welsh and Scottish parliaments, you can bet that social care will again be the dog that has not barked. Although adult and children’s services together account for at least three-quarters of all spending by top-tier English councils, politicians of all stripes prefer to talk about almost anything else.
Rest assured that there will have been furious campaigning on potholes, bin collections and street cleaning. Low-traffic neighbourhoods and 20mph speed limits will have had candidates at each other’s throats. But care charges, home adaptations, assistive technology? Chances are you will not have heard a peep.
According to the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), the local government finance body, adult and children’s services combined accounted for an average 78% of all top-tier English councils’ spending in 2024-25, rising to 86% of that of county councils. Those figures are almost certainly even higher now.
Colin Noble, a Conservative councillor in Suffolk and a longstanding champion of social care, reckons that his county is spending 77p in every pound on adults and young people transitioning from children’s services. Yet as Noble told a recent social care seminar organised by the Local Government Association (LGA), ‘We are about to fight an election and not one word will be talked about social care.’ No one in the room demurred.
What explains this extraordinary state of affairs? The 30-year failure to reform social care has of course left councils bearing a growing and increasingly insupportable burden, squeezing other services to enable them to fund statutory care duties. But why do they not kick back? Have they all sworn an Oath of Omertà?
For the two main political parties, guilty consciences may come into play. In 2010 and 2017, reform plans were scuppered by the Conservatives and Labour, respectively, each crying wolf during general election campaigns over the cost to taxpayers. Principal figures on both sides have since apologised for, as political strategists say, ‘going low’.
We are now, though, in a multi-party political world. As Damian Green, former Tory first minister and now chair of the Social Care Foundation, reminded the LGA event, there were five parties represented at the seminar and even more with a credible chance of forming at least part of a coalition Government after the next general election. Any new deal on social care would need broad-based support before it was put to the electorate.
Herein lies a big problem. Baroness Louise Casey, tasked with shaping the national care service promised by the current Labour Government, is not due to submit her final report until 2028. The next general election must be held by 2029 at the latest. Politicians being politicians, there is clearly an enormous risk of history repeating itself during that campaign and of the plans being shot down in flames for short-term party advantage.
How to square this circle? The obvious answer is to do everything possible to bring the timetable forward. This could mean Casey working faster and submitting earlier, which she has hinted might be possible, or opening up her emerging conclusions to discussion among the political parties before she completes. Ideally, we should want both.
So far under this Government, which came into office promising cross-party dialogue on social care, there has been only one such meeting. Things need to change, and fast.
How can the sector’s issues be made more visible to the electorate? Comment on this column or join the conversation to share your thoughts.
David Brindle is a social care commentator and former Public Services Editor of The Guardian. Email: [email protected] Linkedin: @David-Brindle