Mixed messages in the coalition’s plans for social care

The new government’s hardliner welfare team strikes fear in mental health service users and disabled people writes Peter Beresford.

It’s not often that a press release runs to twice the length of the document it announces. But so it is with the coalition government’s programme for social care: just 177 skilfully crafted words encoded with signs and symbols for the expert audience, set the new scene. Still in there are key words such as control, dignity, respect and prevention. There remains a powerful commitment to personal budgets and direct payments, so those dawdling local authorities who hoped it would all go away can expect renewed pressure to get up to speed. Just as in New Labour’s pre-election white paper, Building the National Care Service, there is the promise of an independent commission on social care funding.

But don’t be fooled. This is a new government with new commitments and concerns. There is no talk of this commission – like its white paper predecessor – ruling in all funding options for consideration. What likelihood is there of any major party nailing its colours to a truly universalist system of social care, when above everything looms the deficit and the agreed coalition response of rapid and far-reaching cuts in public expenditure? If anything, this has exaggerated rather than helped revise the cross-party view of social care policy as a net cost, rather than one that could make possible savings overall.

The coalition has achieved a consensus on social care that might not previously have been thought possible. But will it be able to square the circle of its policy aims with its self-set financial means? There’s no talk of protected funding here, as there is with the NHS. What chance is there of achieving the sustainable social care for the next generation that all parties agree will only be possible with an effective funding system, when the maths for contributory systems is as uncertain as ever?

This is only one of the conundrums facing the coalition. Its programme addresses social care, disability, welfare benefits, pensions and older people. But they are set out in three separate places, in a way that symbolises the old silo thinking.

There are positive noises about harmonising health and social care. But worrying is the potential increasing friction between the coalition’s empowering objectives for social care and its emphasis on curtailing abuse of welfare benefits. Its appointment of a hardliner team of Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Freud sends frightening and discouraging messages to many disabled people and mental health service users.

Punitive assessment of employment support allowance claimants under Labour already brought the system into disrepute. No party’s credentials will ultimately be helped by a blanket proposal such as the new programme’s reassessment of “all current claimants of incapacity benefit for their readiness to work”. We know that this strikes particularly heavily against mental health service users, where all progressive policy – including personal budgets and employment support – still lags far behind.

New Labour’s Big Care Debate, however, does leave one positive legacy. As policymakers, service users, carers and the public, we are all now in a much stronger and better informed position to make our case for the future of social care. That’s the crucial coalition that will be needed if we are to honour our obligation to future generations and forge an equitable and viable social care system.

• Peter Beresford is professor of social policy at Brunel University