Lib Dems insist they are still focused on social care, despite leader concentrating again on carers

Senior Liberal Democrat MPs have insisted they are still committed to social care reform and want to move towards eliminating all care charges, despite the party saying little or nothing about the issue during its annual conference this week.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey focused again on improving support for “family carers” – he is one himself – but said nothing in his main speech about disabled people who rely on care and support, other than saying he wanted to see a country that “properly values care” and one “where we take care seriously”.

He mentioned family carers like himself 10 times in Tuesday’s speech, without once mentioning the adult social care crisis, which sees tens of thousands of disabled people falling into debt every year because of care charges.

Last year, Disability Law Service published research which showed that disabled people across England were continuing to face unlawful discrimination and inequality on an “unparalleled” scale due to “unjust” social care charging policies.

Earlier in the conference, Dr Danny Chambers, the party’s mental health spokesperson, told Disability News Service (DNS) that he was in favour of moving towards free social care.

He said disabled people were “inadvertently sort of being punished for having a disability because of the changes in personal independence payment and all that kind of stuff, so if it ends up giving people more independence and allowing them to live a much more fulfilling life, it actually ends up costing the taxpayer less anyway.”

At last year’s general election, the party promised to offer free personal care to all adults, although it would not scrap charges for other support such as housework, shopping, laundry and engaging with the local community.

During a Health Foundation and Ipsos fringe event, Dr Chambers said the party was “absolutely focusing” on social care.

The Winchester MP said that, at any one time, the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester had between 160 and 200 people “who would be better off cared for with a social care package than stuck in a hospital bed”.

But, he said, it costs more than £850 a night to keep someone in a hospital bed and only a fraction of that to fund a social care package.

This may save a council money from its social care budget, he told the meeting, but “as a tax-payer, you don’t care which silo it comes out of, it’s costing us £850 a night to keep these hundreds of people in a hospital bed that don’t need it.

“Our mantra has been, ‘You can’t fix the NHS without fixing social care.’”

He said his party had been “genuinely disappointed and quite annoyed” that the new Labour government had so far placed “so little emphasis on social care”, including in the NHS 10 Year Health Plan for England, and the NHS workforce plan, due this autumn, and extra funding provided to the NHS.

He said: “None of it is focusing on social care.

“They are pouring money into a leaky bucket, and if you do not plug those holes it doesn’t matter how much money or how much you try and reform other parts of the NHS, it means there’s always going to be this huge drain that means you cannot unblock these huge problems.”

At a question-and-answer session (pictured), also attended by Dr Chambers, the party’s health and care spokesperson, Helen Morgan, told DNS that she came away from a cross-party roundtable meeting on social care reform feeling “reasonably optimistic”.

The long-awaited meeting was held to discuss the work of the government’s Independent Commission on Adult Social Care, which is chaired by the crossbench peer Baroness [Louise] Casey.

It was attended by senior representatives from the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Green and Reform UK parties, including health and social care secretary Wes Streeting.

Asked by DNS whether she was encouraged by the attitudes of the other parties on social care, Morgan said on Monday that she came away feeling “reasonably optimistic”.

But she said she made clear in the meeting that the Liberal Democrats believed that the timetable set by the government, which will not see the commission produce a final report until 2028, was “too late”.

But she said: “At least we had that first discussion, and we had that opportunity to point out the urgency of delivering.

“It was an introductory discussion; it was trying to find the points of similarity between the different manifestos.

“I wouldn’t say there were any particular breakthroughs in the first discussion.

“At least we had that first discussion, and we had that opportunity to point out the urgency of delivering.”

Dr Chambers said earlier in the week that the government’s decision to wait until 2028 for the commission’s final report suggested it was “playing for time”.

He said: “We don’t need to wait until 2028 to say something needs to be done and then start the process of implementing something.”

At another fringe meeting, hosted by the Liberal Democrat Disability Association (LDDA), Dr Katharine Macy, LDDA’s chair, called for the party to do more to focus on social care.

They wrote the young carers motion to the party conference in 2019 which kickstarted Davey’s focus on carers.

And they told the fringe meeting that the party’s public statements on care can sometimes suggest that disabled people are “a burden”.

Dr Macy, a disabled person and carer themself, said: “There are times when it has crossed the line. There are times when it very much skirts the line.”

They said their party needed to be aware that there were more disabled people than carers, although the emphasis in its public statements also reflected a culture where caring is seen as noble and being disabled is seen as being a burden “and that is where we can start to change things”.

Dr Macy said the party needed to address its focus on caring rather than social care, but that the Liberal Democrats needed to do that by saying more about social care rather than less about caring.

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