Social Care

This is the big one. Everyone in politics knows that social care has to be sorted. The analysis has been done, by Andrew Dilnot in 2011, but ever since then the politicians have nudged away from actually taking the plunge - deciding who gets what, how it’s paid for, how social care relates to the NHS. And then along comes Covid, lighting up the weaknesses that were there before, and we pay a huge cost in money and lives. So, what about it, guys?

Boris Johnson, who would always rather make an announcement than take a decision, breezily said it was already sorted when he became PM in 2019. He just hasn’t chosen to let us in on the details, and since Covid started that’s been a convenient excuse to keep kicking the can down the road. A “do or die” meeting was planned for June 21, between Johnson, Sunak and Hancock, but was then postponed. Nobody said why, or whether a new date had been agreed. But the next day government sources were busily briefing that an announcement would be made before the end of the year. So that’s OK, then. It’s all in hand.