David Mowat, a health minister, last week told a select committee that we need “to start thinking as a society about how we deal with the care of our own parents” (Care of elderly parents should be your responsibility, says minister, 31 January). He contrasted the approach with that of looking after children – “it is just what you do” – and argued that looking after our parents “is a similar responsibility in terms of our lifecycle”. The inference appeared to be that he does not believe that family carers are doing enough, despite him acknowledging that there are six million people in the country with caring responsibilities.
Such apparently muddled thinking is unhelpful, particularly when he went on to suggest that “part of the solution is properly bringing those informal carers into some kind of system”. Care happens within the context of a relationship, and trying to legislate for what that should look like is unnecessary and inappropriate. Mowat needs to understand the complexity and diversity of informal care – not everyone needing care has children, and the nature of modern life means that, even if they do, they aren’t always living in close proximity. Most care for older people actually comes from a spouse or partner, typically coping with their own advancing age and increasing ill health. Instead of arguing that society needs reminding of its responsibilities, and bringing such care into a “system”, Mowat should recognise that carers provide far more support than do health and social care services, and far from requiring a nudge to step up to their responsibilities, carers need proper recognition and support.
Dr Melanie Henwood
Hartwell, Northamptonshire
• I invite David Mowat to bathe his mother when the time for care comes. Also to take her to the toilet and ensure her personal hygiene. Quite different from bathing a child and changing its nappy. On a minister’s salary, he may be able to pay for someone to do this, instead of denying his mother dignity and saving his own embarrassment. The reality is that it is mostly daughters who would do the caring, giving up their jobs, reducing their own pensions and facing such indignities. In this society, where family members are often long distances apart and women of all ages are expected to work, Mr Mowat’s suggestion lacks the kind of intelligent analysis one might expect from a health minister. It is not lack of love for our parents which has led to this situation, but an economy and a society which is very much changed since the 1950s, its extended families and lower life expectancy.
Moira Sykes
Manchester
• After decades of being the Cinderella service of the welfare state, this year we can finally see social care beginning to rise to the top of the political agenda. From the British Red Cross to former ministers, it is now accepted that the system is in crisis and something must be done. The danger is that we repeat what’s happened in the past and set up yet another commission to tell us what we already know. As organisations whose members both deliver and receive care, we know that the public is way ahead of the politicians on this issue because they have experienced how the social care system has let their loved ones down: the flying 15-minute visits, the lack of training, low pay and high turnover of staff, the dubious financial structures of many large care providers and the withdrawal of help to some of our most vulnerable citizens have all been well documented.
Of course, at the heart of the crisis is the need for additional funding – but we need to put public money to the best possible use. Privatisation of care has mean that much of it is lost in debt financing and profit margins. New solutions and additional funding must mean better models of care and employment. In the fifth richest country in the world, we have to look not only at how we can share the cost of social care across society as a whole, but also how those services can be integrated into a publicly run health service. A new health and social care service, funded through effective taxation, is one obvious answer.
Dot Gibson General secretary, National Pensioners Convention, Heather Wakefield Head of local government, Unison
• Could David Mowat explain how my wife and I, entering our 70s, could accommodate her mother, a 90-year-old Alzheimer’s sufferer with severe mobility problems, in our two-bedroom terraced house with space for one bathroom? My parents are recently deceased but it would have also been really useful to have had a government guide on how we might have accommodated my elderly mother – with dementia, incontinence and restricted mobility – in the same house or perhaps visited her daily from just under 300 miles away. Or cared for my father in his 90s who was attempting to care for his wife while dealing with his own failing kidneys, before his fatal fall.
Richard Hooper
Accrington
• Care needs to be seen as a continuum and for some it may be impossible to remain at home; either their needs are too great or they make a positive choice to reside in another community. It is therefore essential that social care is put on an even footing with health care and funded accordingly.
Professor Martin Green
Chief executive, Care England
• As an “ageing person” myself, the last thing I want in my declining years is to become an enforced, disruptive dependent, thrust into the busy lives of my offspring. The outstanding flaw in David Mowat’s analogy with caring for the kids we bring into the world, is that we voluntarily choose to bring them here, largely for our own gratification, and therefore we have an innate responsibility to them. Furthermore, civilisation does not survive without such care. Conversely, our children did not choose their own creation, or for us to be their parents, so therefore have no such automatic reciprocal obligation.
Alan Fowler
Newcastle upon Tyne
• As a Labour councillor and former hedge fund trader I have some thoughts on Surrey’s proposed 15% rise in council tax. One of the problems with councils pleading poverty (Opinion, 21 January), is that so many of them, including Labour ones, took part in a Tory austerity scheme to freeze council tax bills. In 2010, George Osborne “bribed” hundreds of councils with “council tax freeze grants” – forcing them to replace percentage tax rises in line with inflation, with a commitment to freeze the cash level of tax. Haringey received around £8.5m in these payments from 2011 to 2015. But due to the compounding effects of money, once these ended (as they did in 2015), the effect of replacing proper, percentage, tax rises with one-off cash payments, meant the council tax base had fallen far behind inflation – and we were millions of pounds cumulatively worse off.
To illustrate, if Haringey council tax bills had simply kept up with RPI, they would be 20% higher today, or 15% higher once we knock out participation in Osborne’s final game, played with local authority finances, the “social care precept” (basically a council tax rise by another name)
. Likewise, Surrey wouldn’t be needing their referendum. And, of course, in all Osborne’s games the sums never really added up; proven by the £650bn in extra debt he left as his legacy of six years as the austerity chancellor – about as much as Labour added during 13 years in power (double the time frame). There is a lesson for Labour councils and politicians: when a Tory chancellor comes bearing “gifts” they’d be wise to recall Alex Ferguson’s infamous quote and “check under the sauce”. But sadly the Tories remain adept at duping both their rivals and the electorate about their supposed economic competence.
Cllr Patrick Berryman
Labour, Haringey
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Modern realities make caring for our aging parents impossible | Letters
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