Find out what we’ve achieved together >>>
In the short-term, the Government must:
1. Provide immediate and sufficient funding to stabilise the social care system and ensure it does not collapse in the worst affected areas.
Looking to the medium term the Government must bring forward a plan to create a fair, effective and sustainable care system with the following features:
2. Risk must be pooled on a compulsory whole (adult) population basis, funded through taxation.
3. Care should be free at the point of use.
4. There must be an independent, standardised national eligibility threshold and assessment process for social care.
5. Eligibility should be set at a ‘moderate’ level to enable those in need of community and preventative support to access it; any proposed solution must not tighten eligibility criteria or otherwise reduce access to social care.
6. Any proposed solution must address the care and support needs of working age disabled adults and those with long-term health conditions as well as those of older people.
7. Any proposed solution must ensure increased support for unpaid carers, e.g. increased breaks and core support, including helping carers to juggle work and care and increased Carer’s Allowance and carers’ benefits.
Our Achievements
#KeepYourPromiseBoris #SocialCareCantWait #DoesRishiReallyCare
June – Dec 2021
First Step | Second Step | Impact
In 2021 the CSA launched its biggest campaign ever, to get the Prime Minister to deliver the promise he made on his first day in office: to “fix social care” for good.
We targeted both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, over six months of alliance-wide campaigning. As a result, we heard that the Prime Minister himself felt pressure from our campaign, and that Rishi had also been aware of the campaign targeted at him.
First Step
The #KeepYourPromiseBoris campaign highlighted how a chronic lack of funding for care was having a devastating impact on older people, disabled people and carers in England. For over 20 years Governments have failed to deliver for funding for care: this has left millions without the basic care they need to keep safe and maintain their dignity, and robbed many more of their chance to be independent.
Our campaign called on the Government to finally introduce reforms and funding to ensure people can get the care they need when they need it, free at the point of use.
Over 20,000 campaigners backed our calls and got #KeepYourPromiseBoris trending on Twitter. Campaigners wrote to their MPs to get them to write to Boris to ensure he would act. This wave of pressure ultimately saw the Government announce historic reforms for social care in September 2021.
Second Step
We then called on the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, to prioritise urgent care funding in his Autumn Spending Review: asking whether he would choose to be a hero, or a villain, for everyone who needs care now. Our campaign hashtags were #SocialCareCantWait and #DoesRishiReallyCare.
We asked people to sign our petition to get the Chancellor to fund care now – and nearly 60,000 people did.
Across both campaigns we were supported by 30 of our member organisations on social media, including Age UK, Mind, the Alzheimer’s Society and the MS Society. We raised the voices of tens of thousands of people across the country calling for urgent funding for social care. Our campaigns attracted national press coverage over the course of 2021 – 95 articles reached 53m people, and a total social media reach of 6.5 million.
Impact
On the 7th September 2021, the Government introduced historic social care reforms: a cap on catastrophic care costs, as well as a Health and Social Care National Insurance levy to generate an extra £12bn per year for three years for health and care services. The PM said the aim of these was “….protecting people against the catastrophic fear of losing everything to pay for the cost of their care…”.
In November 2021, increased funding for councils was announced, though sadly not enough to ensure people get the care they need with it.
Then, in December, the Government published a Social Care White Paper, which set out some modest additional proposals for social care reform.
These historic announcements have marked a step in the right direction, and are significant after 20 years of neglect from various Government. But the reality is that social care is in desperate need for much more funding, and immediate reforms to address the chronic staff shortages that are resulting in rationing of care.
Read the CSA’s full responses to the Government’s Health and Social Care NI increase and the White Paper on social care >>>
