Fight for nationalisation
Dave Gorton, Chesterfield Socialist Party
Trade union leaders fell over each other to congratulate Andy Burnham on his Labour Party Conference speech. Unison’s Andrea Egan welcomed the legal repeal of the public ownership ban on water and called for full renationalisation of water, but didn’t call for the same about social care. Others were even more embarrassing in their unjustified praise.
But Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham said before Burnham’s speech: “Going to a group of people who are getting around £12,500 a year in order to pay for it [social care], to take away their security, is wrong – I think it’s morally wrong.”
Yet, Burnham made it plainly clear that while ordinary working-class people will be asked to pay, not a single penny will be taken from those who’ve robbed social care for decades – big-business private profiteers and billionaires.
But the figures speak for themselves:
- More than 400,000 people are currently waiting for a care assessment, review or direct payment. 250,000 older people have died since 2014-15 waiting for care that never arrived in time
- Councils in England were already £715 million over budget last year (on adult care alone). They are spending more than 80% of their core funding on adult and children’s social care
- Private equity firms own or partly own 11 of England’s 20 largest fostering and children’s home providers. The four largest independent fostering agencies have paid out or reserved at least £205 million in interest to shareholders and investors since 2020
- Local authorities in England have spent £250 million on more than 1,800 unlawful placements of children in unregistered homes over the past two years. A recent prosecution saw one set of owners fined £92,400, with surcharges of £2,960 and costs of £17,250. In this single case, the directors who were acting illegally collected more than £1.7 million from local authorities
- Social care private provision stands at 83% while the public sector is responsible for just 4%. Public money has simply been handed over to private equity-funded big business. Unless this is stopped and reversed, no social care plan will survive. Extra money put into it will still be siphoned off into the pockets of private profiteers
The starting point for any reform of social care has to be the nationalisation of the resources with no compensation given to those who’ve plundered the system for decades. Nothing else will suffice.
