Author Archives: Lucy Nethsingha

If ever there’s an issue – or a sub-section of a broader issue – that sums up the sense that the UK is broken, even eight months after a new government was supposed to set a new direction, it’s social care.

The crisis in social care has been recognised for decades, but successive governments have failed to tackle it, and it’s getting rapidly worse. This is bad enough on its own, but it has two serious knock-on effects: it reduces the effectiveness of the NHS as it cannot release from hospitals some patients who are fit to leave but have nowhere to go; and it further drags down the reputation of local government, which doesn’t have the resources to deal with social care and sinks ever lower in the public’s estimation. Add the effects of Brexit, Covid, the cost-of-living crisis and a toxic debate on immigration, and you see why the situation with social care is worse now than it has ever been.

So what do we do? Well, a lot of money would help – most solutions to the social care problem require money, but, let’s face it, the kind of public spending that just isn’t feasible at the moment. So we have to look in other directions.

There have been four major shocks to the social care system in recent years: Covid, the cost-of-living crisis, Brexit, and Britain’s attitude towards immigration. The first two are factors largely outside our control. We can’t undo the loss of so many NHS and care staff due to the impact of Covid, and the cost of living crisis, coupled with repeated rises to the Real Living Wage and NI rates for employers, has sent the cost of staff rocketing, with many care companies struggling to compete for permanent staff and often forced to pay high wages to agency personnel.