Two proposals in the course of a week present opposing approaches to England’s care crisis. A government scheme will recruit volunteers to run errands, in a desperate attempt to lessen the problem of people stuck in hospital because they can’t be safely discharged. Tasks, including collecting prescriptions, will be allocated via an app. A far more substantial plan from the Fabian Society sets out a roadmap for what it hopes will be a Starmer-led government. It also shows up the present government’s scheme for the panicked quick fix that it is.
But there is no easy solution for a social policy challenge that only gets more challenging the longer it is deferred. The population is ageing, more people with disabilities are living for longer, and the need for care continues to rise. Currently there are 165,000 vacancies in the sector, and data suggests that the workforce shrank last year. But still the party that has governed the country for the past 13 years shies away from implementing the reforms it commissioned from Andrew Dilnot in 2011, or even from more modest steps such as improved training (a £500m boost to workforce spending was recently halved).
