'There was no plan to fix social care crisis and there still isn't'

We didn’t have a war in Ukraine. We didn’t have a cost of living crisis, soaring inflation and unaffordable energy costs, and we didn’t have a pandemic.

What we did have was a new prime minister, Boris Johnson, standing at the lectern in Downing Street promising to fix the crisis in social care ‘once and for all’.

He had a clear plan, he promised, to give every older person the ‘dignity and security they deserve’.

And we all hoped it was a promise he would keep. But sadly, like so many other Johnson promises, it just wasn’t true.

There was no plan and there was no dignity and security for older people and there still isn’t.

And to make matters worse another one of his not quite true promises – the oven-ready Brexit deal – only served to exacerbate an already bad situation with the ending of freedom of movement for EU citizens seeing thousands of European workers returning home, never to return.

The care sector was heavily reliant on those EU workers and the gaps they left still haven’t been filled.

And just look at the problem that has created. Not enough care workers means elderly people who could be discharged from hospital are becoming ‘bed blockers’ because a care plan can’t be put in place for them.

As you sow, so shall you reap, as the Good Book says.

I mention this after reading about the real-world effects of years of failure to deal with the crisis in adult social care, and to a lesser extent, child social care (I don’t mean child social care is less important, only there are fewer children in the care system than adults).

According to a news report by Belinda Ryan of the Local Democracy Reporting Service, a massive 65 per cent of all the council tax cash collected by Cheshire East Council is spent on about 10,000 very vulnerable people and that is 10,000 people out of a total of 400,000.

Cllr Kath Flavell told the council’s corporate policy committee that because council tax payers, instead of central government, had to foot the bill for adult social care and children’s social care, savings had to be made in other areas which then affected all residents when the inevitable cuts were imposed.

She added: “We, as councillors, do not want to make these cuts to services, and it's very painful for us and we know how that's going to be received by a lot of people.”

She said the public probably didn’t realise that 65 per cent of Cheshire East council tax revenue goes on social care for adults and children.

“But when you actually add up, there are fewer than 3,000 children who are open to social care and there are around 7,000 adults who are open to social care, that represents 10,000 people out of 400,000, so we’re talking about that tiny percentage of people getting that money,” said Cllr Flavell.

Oh if only the government had a clear plan to give every older person the ‘dignity and security they deserve’ as a former prime minister promised us only a couple of years ago.

He couldn’t have been lying when he said it, could he?

On another separate but related topic, I see the aftershocks of the Johnson regime are still being felt and in this instance are seriously undermining the BBC.

Now I was a big fan of the Beeb and once had a very long conversation with a senior executive about how hard the organisation tries to be even-handed and impartial in its news output. It is an admirable objective, even if it has become somewhat skewed in recent years.

The thing with the BBC is I always felt I could trust it but in the light of recent events, sadly that’s not my view any more.

The reason for my scepticism is the mounting pressure on BBC chairman Richard Sharp after a critical report from MPs into his appointment.

The report says he made “significant errors of judgement” acting as a go-between on a £800,000 loan for Boris Johnson, while applying for the post. It was Johnson who had final approval of Sharp’s appointment.

According to The Guardian, former banker Sharp was a prominent Tory party donor and fan of Brexit as well as being prime minister Rishi Sunak’s boss when they both worked at investment bank Goldman Sachs.

So no, I don’t trust the BBC to be impartial any more and that makes me quite sad. Johnson really is proving to be something of a King Midas in reverse where everything he touches turns to dross and we are all the poorer for it.