Care: the head of NHS England once said he wanted change but now it seems clear it will be for the worse.
The Tory government promised to revitalise social care in the UK – but seems set to renege on that vow.
Is this the next big Tory scandal?
Ministers are poised to cut £250m from investment in the social care workforce in England, it has been reported, in a move that providers say could set back care “for years to come”.
With more than 165,000 care worker jobs vacant, and low pay driving staff to quit for better wages in retail and hospitality, care providers and councils have been clamouring for investment in recruitment and retention. Inadequate staffing levels are frequently noted as a cause of neglect and poor care by the Care Quality Commission.
However, according to the Health Service Journal (subscription), the government is poised to water down a promise it made in the December 2021 social care white paper to dedicate £500m to “investment in knowledge, skills, health and wellbeing, and recruitment policies [that] will improve social care as a long-term career choice”. This amount could be cut to £250m.
Businesses may go bust after April this year, because the government is halving the amount of money it is providing to support them with their energy bills.
The total level of government support is expected to fall by more than half from the £18.4bn the current six-month scheme is estimated to have cost by the time it ends.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt told industry leaders last week that the current scheme to support businesses was “unsustainably expensive”.
So the scheme, which caps the unit cost of gas and electricity for all businesses, will be replaced at the beginning of April with a new scheme that offers a discount on wholesale prices rather than a fixed price. The new scheme is expected to run until March 2024.
Hunt was challenged on the usefulness of the scheme – but claimed that the government’s aim was to bring down inflation because that would have a better benefit for business.
And he said Ofgem had been tasked with investigating whether the system was working properly because it was understood that firms are not yet benefiting from falls on the wholesale cost of gas:
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Matt Hancock: doesn’t he look smug? Most liars do, when they think they’ll get away with it.
Has Matt Hancock not resigned yet? No?
Shame. He should have gone, just for wasting up to 40,000 coronavirus testing kits by posting them out – sometimes multiple kits to the same homes – with no return address.
Recipients were told to bin them.
This is at a time when people are dying of this disease.
So to the commenter on This Site who wrote: “I have heard, but cannot corroborate, that some tests have arrived with no return envelope nor address. When people have contacted the help centre they have been advised to toss them in the bin and another would be sent out. If they are counting tests sent out then that would count as two tests”…
I can respond with this:
Seen this Craig god knows how many test kits are like this.#COVID__19 testing kit arrived without a return label. When I called the helpline she said a lot had been sent out without them in and to just put it in the bin. I wonder if this will be counted as part of 122k
Worse still, if you wanted even more proof that the Tories rigged the system so they could parade a lie before us… it seems the number of tests carried out on May 1 – even under the new system – almost halved:
So, after claiming they‘d hit their 100k target for coronavirus tests yesterday, the number of people tested today has mysteriously dropped to just 63k.
The overall increase in testing is a good improvement, but why can’t the government just be honest about the numbers?
Thousands of test kits posted out with no return address, with several sent to the same homes.
And Matt Hancock is still Health and Social Care Secretary.
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