Dave Gorton, Chesterfield Socialist Party
Another prime minister. Another promise to tackle the social care crisis. Both their regularity has become commonplace. So have the failures.
Andy Burnham’s speech on social care was littered with his family experiences and no doubt heartfelt.
Ultimately though, it will not be private feelings that achieve real improvements but the system under which those feelings operate. Burnham committed to strive for “common ground” across the whole political spectrum.
Common ground?
Leaving aside Labour’s shift over recent decades to a party completely embracing big-business capitalism, how do you reach common ground amid wholesale privatisation and huge profiteering deliberately introduced by those parties?
Of course this now includes Labour, who have fully embraced the private ownership of care model. Unite the Union general secretary, Sharon Graham, said:
“Britain’s social care system … has been turned into a cash cow for profiteers making money on the back of … suffering. Fixing [it] will need a serious plan with real money, that puts workers, pensioners and everyday people first, not the profiteers.”
Unite continued: “Immediate actions need to take place including regulation… empowering existing structures to hold private firms accountable for failures and financing local authorities to take over ownership of firms where highly leveraged companies have failed or are highly likely to fail.”
The largest social care union, Unison, stopped at “Most social care in England is… delivered by private companies, in a system… run down by huge funding cuts and profit extraction.” Nothing about how Unison would challenge this other than trusting Burnham.
Whatever the intent, the announcement was just kicking the can further down the road. Words about delivering quality care for users and better pay, terms and conditions for workers delivering that care, are meaningless without powers to enforce that against providers who refuse or fail.
That must be the starting point of the discussion surrounding the creation of a National Care Service.
The delivery of residential care in the UK shifted dramatically from the public and voluntary sector being responsible for over 89% in 1960 to today, where private provision stands at 83%. The public sector is responsible for just 4%!
Four of the five largest providers in adult home care are either owned by private equity firms, US hedge funds or billionaires based abroad.
Taking those services out of the hands of the profit-seeking bosses to be public owned, fully funded and under the democratic control of workers, service users and the community must be a key demand from the trade unions.
Imperative
It would be a major boost in getting social care workers – for too long virtually forgotten by unions – to join and fight for their own destiny and the services they provide.
As we wrote in 2025, “if the big business profiteers were removed from the equation altogether, without compensation for the super-rich who exploit the sector, there would be enough money available for year-on-year improvements so workers could benefit from an immediate £15-an-hour minimum wage, full sick pay and decent pensions.”
The Socialist Party demands:
- Renationalise social care. Bring all services back in-house with no compensation paid to the profiteers at the top, only on the basis of proven need
- Pay care workers an immediate minimum wage of £15 an hour without exemptions,
as a step towards a real living wage - Reverse cuts to local government. Take the wealth off the super-rich to fund the services we need
- For a democratic socialist plan for health and social care, with workers, service users and the local community deciding what we need not what makes a profit for a few
