Green Party candidates standing in Newcastle-under-Lyme at the local elections have joined calls for social care to be fully funded for all adults, putting it on a par with the NHS.
Adult social care covers caring for people older, living with a physical or mental illness or disability, allowing them to do safely and with dignity, currently 1.5million people in the UK work in social care, there is also a vast unseen army of ‘unofficial’ carers, usually family members.
Anyone with assets, including the value of their home, above £23,250 is not eligible for help with care costs, as a result the National Audit Office estimated that in 2016/17 people spent £10.9billion paying for privately funded social care.
Over a decade of austerity has seen a serious deterioration in funding for health and social care services and have left staff working in the sector feeling exhausted and undervalued.
The announcement by the Conservatives that care costs will be capped at £86,000 does not go far enough to help families hit by unexpected care bills, and the rise in National Insurance payments to fund social care will leave individuals and families who are already struggling to make ends meet even further out of pocket.
Labour have also let down people struggling to meet the cost of care by dropping their policy advocating free social care in June last year.
Proposing the motion to back free social care for all at the party’s Autumn conference in October, Larry Sanders said “The hundreds of thousands of people who need help to eat and wash, get residential care when they need it and to lead a full life under their own control, can do so with their support paid for in the same way as the NHS. The Tory government said that charges should be capped at £86,000. We say they should be capped at zero”.
Adding after the motion had been approved by conference: “The NHS is based on the principle that need, not wealth, should determine the health care we get. Today, the Green Party backed the same principle for Social Care”.
The Green Party are calling for funding for the NHS to be increased by £6billion a year, paid for by scrapping the government’s £5billion a year road building programme. In addition, they support calls by health sector unions for a 15% pay rise for health care corkers and an end to private sector involvement in providing NHS services.
The Greens are calling for improvements to mental health services, giving them equal status with those dealing with physical health, along with reductions in waiting times and for more to be done to help communities that struggle to access services.
They are also calling for more to be done to address the gender imbalance in how healthcare is funded, particularly around maternity and post-natal care.
A spokesperson for North Staffs Green Party said, “a decade and more of chronic underfunding have left social care services on their knees despite the fact that as the number of older people in the population grows, they are more vital than ever”.
Adding that “it is a basic human right to be able to live safely and with dignity and to have help to do so if you need it, all of our candidates support funding social care for all and paying the people who work in the sector properly”.
Green Party candidates in Newcastle-under-Lyme are Will Wood (Cross Heath) and Jessie Mellor (Bradwell).