This weeks editor of the Hackney Post, Holly Evans, shares her views on the annual budget – and the let-down of the social care sector.
During his first speech as prime minister, Boris Johnson promised to address the social care issue “once and for all”. More than a year and a pandemic later, our healthcare system is in crisis, 6 million people depend on Universal Credit and the NHS is facing a patient backlog of 4.6 million. Once again, social care is strikingly absent from the government’s annual Budget.
It is understandable that care providers, health unions and charities are dismayed. After a gruesome year, which has seen 40,000 care residents die from the disease, Covid-19 has only amplified the adult social care crisis. The Independent Care Group has estimated that about 1.4 million people are not receiving the care they need, and calls for a 10-year, £7bn injection have been ignored. While a number of short-term grants have been given to improve workforce recruitment, these schemes are due to finish this month. For overstretched care-workers and nursing staff, it is undoubtedly a kick in the teeth.
Rubbing salt in the wound, Treasury documents reveal that NHS England will face a £8.6bn funding cut in 2021-22. For all those Thursday evenings spent clapping on the steps of Downing Street, it appears the Treasury’s gratitude only went this far. With no suggestion of a pay rise or a strategy to help with the enormous backlog of surgery and cancer treatments, our exhausted NHS workforce must still search for their silver lining.
The announcement to extend furlough pay until September and the decision to maintain the £20 uplift to Universal Credit is a step in the right direction. But Rishi Sunak’s Budget has glazed over the deepening inequalities in our social care system. Let us not forget that 10 years of austerity and NHS cuts led us into this pandemic with a 100,000 unfilled NHS jobs – a point Sir Keir Starmer aptly pointed out.
Rishi’s road to recovery might be a start but with social care reforms now pushed back until later this year, there is very real concern that it will be too little and too late.
