Labor will aim to introduce a national care service in England with just as much ambition as the 1945 government that introduced the NHS, the shadow health secretary has said, launching a review of how it will work.
In an interview with the Guardian, Wes Streeting said he had asked the Fabian Society to look at how the service would be funded and structured, with a view to rolling it out over several parliaments.
He said the immediate priority would be securing better pay, training and full employment rights for carers, as well as tougher national standards. The ‘long term vision’ will be a national service on a par with Aneurin Bevan’s vision for the NHS.
“I would love to see a national care service delivered on exactly the same terms as the NHS, publicly owned, publicly funded, free at the point of use, but we have to be honest about the scale of the challenge. So our starting point is to make sure we deliver national standards for care users and better pay and conditions for staff who work in social care,” Streeting said.
He added: “I think the key thing about a national care service is that it’s a journey, not an event. We could not achieve this overnight or even in one parliament.
“It’s about how we lay the foundations for that in the first term of a Labor government and then look to build on that in a second or third term.”
He raised concerns about many care homes owned by private equity groups, with one in seven substandard and in need of improvement. The review will look at whether privately owned care homes can become publicly owned.
“If private providers are to continue to play a role in the provision of social care, then they must provide care of good quality and with a spirit of public service,” he said.
Streeting said he was “really open-minded” about who should be in charge of the public national care service, whether the NHS, local councils or another body.
Former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn promised a national care service in the 2019 manifesto, but his successor Keir Starmer said he was wiping the slate clean and rewriting the manifesto from scratch.
Streeting said the national care service was “unfinished business” for Labour, which published a white paper on the idea as one of its latest acts in government.
“As Keir Starmer pointed out this week, the Labor Party is starting from scratch and writing a manifesto that looks to the future, not the past. We will work for a national care service,” he said.
“That is Labor and that is my commitment as shadow health secretary. And one argument I want to see is that unless we confront the crisis in social care, the backlog in the NHS will be harder to resolve.
In its review of social care, the Fabian Society will look at the structure of the care home market and how the next Labor government will ensure good standards of care for all and professional standards for carers across the sector.
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As for caregiver pay, Streeting said there should be a significant increase. “If you look at how things have changed under the Tories, it used to be that carers were paid 30p an hour more than retail but now they get 20p less than retail and now we’re losing workers to the to companies like Amazon, who – let’s be honest – aren’t known for their pay, terms and conditions.”
Last month, the Scottish Government set out plans for a national care service to overhaul aged care with a focus on care at home. It will not nationalize the sector, but will make the bosses of medical firms directly accountable to Scottish ministers in a more centralized system.
Scottish Labor said it was not a genuine national care service but a “power grab” aimed at taking power away from local councils, while Unite called it “an incomprehensible, incoherent and terrible bill”.
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