“The NHS undoubtedly saved my life, but social care helps me live it.” That is what a participant at a roundtable event on social care told me recently.
Last October, the health and social care select committee I chair resolved to investigate the cost of successive governments’ inaction on reforming adult social care. Of course, the human cost to individuals in terms of unfulfilled lives is a weighty moral argument – reason enough in itself to reform the sector, as the government has promised to do, starting with an independent commission led by Louise Casey.