Theresa May’s decision to single out Ealing for attack on adult social care at prime minister’s questions is bizarre and unfair (Councils can get social care cash early, says PM, 15 December). Despite significant funding pressures, Ealing council has one of the best re-ablement services in the country, with 93% of older people who use this service still at home three months after hospital discharge, a record we are proud of. Ealing works closely with our local NHS to provide a seamless discharge service: our rate of delays to discharge due to social care issues is average, not the worst.
Since 2010, government cuts have led to a reduction in Ealing’s adult social care budget of nearly 20%. The council tax precepts the government has allowed us are sticking plasters by comparison. I’m proud that, rather than levying a precept on Ealing residents, as the prime minister seems to want us to do, our success in growing Ealing’s economy and building homes has provided us with the resources to provide extra social care funding that more than matches what a precept would raise. We’ve allocated £2.3m extra for social care this year, rising to £4m by 2019, along with a £5m transformation fund to redesign services so fewer people need intensive help in future.
Councils, like Ealing, that are innovating, redesigning and delivering high-quality social care in very difficult financial conditions, while not demanding extra money from just about managing local families, deserve Theresa May’s praise, not her censure.
Cllr Julian Bell
Labour leader of Ealing council
• My Labour-controlled local authority recently announced cuts to its budget of £82m up to 2020 and more than 400 job losses. These are on top of the cuts already implemented of £250m and 2,000 redundancies since 2010. In real terms, the council’s budget will have been cut by 50%. Any small increase to social care funding through higher council tax has to be set in this overall context (Council tax hike considered to cover social care costs, theguardian.com, 12 December).
All over the country, local authorities are facing a similar funding crisis, with accumulating evidence of how vital local services have been decimated and the serious consequences for local communities. No amount of Orwellian double-speak about efficiency savings, partnership working and smart delivery should be allowed to disguise the fact that the loss of skilled workers, the closure of facilities and cutbacks to services are leading to the biggest crisis of local provision ever seen in this country.
It’s time for councillors to reject the logic of imposed austerity. There should be a coordinated campaign by all Labour-led authorities not to set another round of cuts budgets. To the predictable response that the government will threaten to suspend councillors and impose administrators – so what? Nothing could be worse than meekly accepting what is, effectively, the destruction of local government in any recognisable form. They should be leading a campaign to restore real local democracy and funding to provide decent local services. Get up off your knees and fight for the working-class communities you are supposed to represent.
Steven Schofield
Bradford
• Changes to council tax and the social care precept will seem to many nothing more than a temporary fix. There is real concern about the postcode lottery nature of these tax-raising powers intended to fund our ailing social care system.
While the changes to the social care council tax precept from 2% to 3% over the next two years are welcome, they do not provide additional funding. The government has missed the opportunity to bring forward some of the £1.5bn additional funding for social care through the Better Care Fund already announced for 2019/20.
The most deprived areas in the UK derive the lowest proportion of their income from council tax. The government’s intention in allowing councils to increase council tax is to spread the financial burden of the nation’s rising social care bill. But council tax payers in deprived areas may be less likely to be able to afford the increase, and many of these who are on low incomes will already be paying reduced rates.
The UK has a long tradition of providing care to those who need it most. If that is to continue, the government must invest in a robust social care system that can cater for all based on needs and not on geography. From a taxpayer’s perspective this is a zero-sum game. For every £1 not invested in social care, the cost to the NHS is considerably more.
Paul Dossett
Head of Public Sector, Grant Thornton UK LLP
• Gaby Hinsliff is right (Do-it-yourself social care only works for the very rich, 16 December). Grown children’s ability to step in where the state fails to care for their elderly parents becomes increasingly decisive. But with the proposed increase in council tax the state is forcing the unemployed to step in. Since April 2013 the unemployment benefits of grown children have been taxed by 259 councils out of 326 in England. Taxation of the weekly £73.10 jobseeker’s allowance/income support/employment and support allowance of single mothers and vulnerable citizens deemed fit for work by the Department for Work and Pensions will now be increased to require the least able to step in to pay for the care of anyone’s elderly parents.
Tenants are also forced to step in by paying not only the increase in council tax but also increases in rent out of their unemployment benefits since April 2013; that is due to the cuts in housing benefit called “local housing allowance”, “single room supplement” or “benefit cap”. Some of them are struggling to pay off rent, council tax, utility and fines arrears that accumulate during the three-month absence of income caused by a benefits sanction.
The supreme court has noted the injustice of taxing benefits in Mosley v Haringey. “Their income was already at a basic level and the effect of Haringey’s proposed scheme would be to reduce it even below that level and thus in all likelihood to cause real hardship, while sparing its more prosperous residents from making any contribution to the shortfall in government funding.”
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty
• I have cancer (non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma) and I was recently taken by ambulance to Plymouth’s Derriford hospital with a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot on the lung). I was admitted to A&E around 1am but spent more than 12 hours on a trolley until a bed could be found for me on the medical assessment unit (MAU). I was one of many patients – most were elderly and frail – waiting on trolleys where there was very little spare room for any more. Nursing staff told me that the delay was because the MAU could not find beds on other wards for patients ready for transfer. I was also told this problem was caused by these wards struggling to discharge medically fit older people because these patients needed social care that is not available.
My experience is just one example of the crisis facing hospital services around the country. Patient care is suffering as a direct result of the economically misguided and unjust consequences of this government’s austerity programme. This policy should be reversed by central government providing immediate funds directly to local government to enable an equitable and adequate provision of social care services to free up beds in NHS hospitals and relieve the pressures on A&E services.
Nigel Charles
South Brent, Devon
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The poor must not be left to pick up the tab for everyone’s social care | Letters
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