Lib Dem conference: Party ‘must campaign to save social care and NHS like our lives depend on it’

The Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader has told her party to campaign to save social care and the NHS “like our lives depend on it”.

Daisy Cooper told her party’s annual conference that good health and social services “transform people’s lives” and that the top priority in parliament for Liberal Democrat MPs would be championing “local health and care services”.

Rather than attacking the Labour government’s failure to act on social care funding since winning power in July, she focused her criticism on the Conservatives.

She said successive Conservative governments had broken their promise to fix social care.

She was speaking as her party’s health and social care spokesperson, but was moved to the Treasury role yesterday (Wednesday) and will be replaced by Helen Morgan.

Cooper said her party had put health and care at the forefront of its successful general election campaign – which led to a record-breaking 72 Liberal Democrat MPs – because “decent health and care services are the bedrock of a liberal society”.

She said this was why the Liberal Democrats were calling on the Labour government to “make the autumn budget a budget to save the NHS and care”.

She told the conference: “We Liberal Democrats must continue to campaign to save our NHS and care like our lives depend on it.

“Because I know, and we know, that so many people’s lives really do.”

She said health was about individual freedom and “you don’t have freedom, if you’re ready to leave hospital and go home, but you’re discharged instead to a care home miles away – losing mobility, independence and connection – for the sole reason that there aren’t the care workers to help you recover at home”.

Cooper spoke in detail publicly for the first time about how, 12 years ago, an aggressive form of Crohn’s disease had left her four days from dying, but how the NHS saved her life and “the people who make the NHS what it is gave me my life back”.

The previous day, party members had overwhelmingly backed a motion that called – as the party had during the election campaign – for free personal care, action to support unpaid carers, and a social care workforce plan.

The motion, which included several measures to “save the NHS”, also called again for cross-party talks on sustainable social care funding, and for funding for local authorities to cover the increased costs resulting from these social care measures.

Prue Bray, deputy leader of Wokingham Council and chair of the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors, said there was a need to “inject enough backbone” into both Labour and the Conservatives to tackle the social care crisis.

She said it was not possible to “fix the NHS without fixing social care”, which “requires cross party commitment to a national funding solution”.

Bray said the cost of adult social care was “one of the main factors cited by councils who feel themselves heading for the cliff edge on a section 114 notice, the equivalent of declaring bankruptcy”.

North Cornwall MP Ben Maguire said Liberal Democrats in parliament “must be more than just a critical friend to this Labour government, who have already demonstrated that social care reform is not top of their agenda” and “must step into the void that the Conservatives have left us while they tear themselves apart”.

Simon Lepori, a councillor with Trafford council, who stood for the party in Wythenshawe and Sale East at the general election and has worked in health and social care for 23 years, supported the motion.

But he said he wanted the party to develop a separate social care motion in time for the next annual conference, rather than one combined with NHS issues, because social care was “a forgotten service”.

Daisy Cooper told the debate (pictured) that when YouGov polled the popularity of policies in parties’ general election manifestos, the top three were Liberal Democrat policies, and one of them was the pledge to introduce free personal care.

She said the Conservatives had spent their time in government “driving our NHS and care into the ground”.

She added: “Labour have made a start, and we appreciate that their inheritance is dire, but with social care and health services in crisis, more is needed.

“It is now our job to make sure that Labour sticks to the job of repairing the damage and delivering quality care for patients.

“That starts by pressuring them to fix our crumbling hospitals and to end the crisis in social care.”

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