Health secretary Steve Barclay has said that the government’s decision to delay the implementation of the lifetime cap on social care costs will enable the sector to benefit from more funding.
The cap of £86,000 was due to come into force in October 2023 but has now been delayed by two years, as per Jeremy Hunt’s recent Autumn Statement.
County councils in England had been calling for the government to delay the cap amid fears of further financial squeezes and staff shortages.
Now, Barclay has said that the additional funding that will come from postponing the cap is to be put toward bolstering the social care sector, therefore allowing the industry to take on patients ready for discharge from NHS hospitals.
The health secretary said that patients medically fit to leave hospital who had to remain due to a lack of social care capacity were the “prime cause” of bed-blocking, which had a knock-on effect on other NHS services such as ambulance response.
Barclay told the BBC: “We're prioritising the funding we need to get that flow into the hospitals and key amongst that is getting more funding into social care.”
He added that over the next year, there would be £2.8 billion of funds made available for social care, which would increase to £4.7billion the year after.
Despite the funding that postponing the cap will help generate, Barclay admitted that putting it on hold has been a “difficult” choice to make.
The health secretary also insisted that the government would, eventually, follow through with the reforms after charity Age UK raised concerns over whether the delay would pave the way for it to be scrapped completely.
Meanwhile, Barclay has faced criticism from the chief of the GMB union after he suggested that the pressure being applied to the NHS and social care was “predominantly” an aftershock of the Covid-19 pandemic.
GMB general secretary Gary Smith said that Conservative austerity cuts were more squarely to blame.
“The Tory government has made ideological decisions for over a decade about cutting services and that's what has left services on their knees, and this is not hyperbole or emotion - our care homes were turned into morgues during the pandemic because of mismanagement and cuts,” he said.
Smith added: “People are dying because of cuts to services so I find that interview (from the health secretary utterly dishonest and frankly the minister is deluded.”
Barclay did admit that ambulance delays did pose a “material risk” to people’s lives, when asked about whether lengthy ambulance response times had led to avoidable deaths. However, he affirmed that this was why government was determined to strengthen social care to ease bed-blocking and bring those response times down.
When quizzed about the impending NHS nurses' strike, Barclay said that the Royal College of Nursing’s demands for a 17.3 per cent pay rise were “unreasonable” and far outstripped the private sector as well as other areas of the public sector.
He also said that although the “door is open” for future negotiations with unions, their leaders had yet “showed no signs” of coming forward for formal talks.
