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It’s refreshing that social care has become a topic over which the putative Labour leadership contenders are prepared to scrap, given how neglected it has been for decades now. Both Andy. Burnham and Wes Streeting want to argue that they would be the leader who would take the radical step of legislating for a National Care Service – something Burnham first proposed back in 2009, just to give you an idea of how long it is taking for anyone to do anything meaningful on this matter. The babies born in the year Burnham unveiled his green paper on adult social care can now drive cars, but they still have no prospect of their grandparents, or indeed parents, being able to access a care system that actually works and is funded properly.
It’s an example of politicians scrapping over just how much they personally care about a problem, without producing much evidence that they’ll be the ones to solve it
Anyway, the latest round of fighting is over whether the government has quietly scrapped plans for a standalone National Care Service body. Documents leaked to the Times suggest that under Streeting’s watch as Health Secretary, officials ruled out this new arms-length body on the basis that Labour is trying to stop the kind of proliferation of quangos that ends up blooming under every government. Streeting doesn’t think he would have signed off on this decision, but wasn’t wedded to it necessarily being in a quango anyway. Logically, given he abolished NHS England as an independent body, it wouldn’t necessarily make sense for him to then set up the NCS as a quango.
