The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has asked to meet Theresa May to discuss emergency funding for Britain’s ailing social care system, which would be the first such cross-party meeting since the new prime minister entered Downing Street.
Corbyn has written to the prime minister seeking urgent talks on how the government might avert the deepening crisis in social care this Christmas. His letter to May calls for “emergency top-up funding” to protect elderly and vulnerable people.
“After £4.6bn of cuts to social care budgets since 2010, more than a million elderly people are not getting the care they need,” his letter says. “Social care is in a deepening crisis which threatens the wellbeing, dignity and lives of hundreds of thousands of older people.”
Corbyn proposed an urgent meeting “at the highest level” to discuss emergency support for social care, to tide services over until April, and longer-term solutions to the funding and restructuring of care provision.
“There is an opportunity to avert a crisis this winter,” he says. “Will your government agree to take it?”
On Thursday, the government announced that council tax would be allowed to rise faster than expected – by about £46 a year for an average home – to bail out struggling social care services for the elderly and vulnerable in England.
However, May’s government has been accused of failing to respond adequately to a growing crisis in the sector, which has suffered huge cuts in funding at a time of rising demand.
A government spokesperson said: “There are a million more over-65s than in 2010. This places additional pressures on social care in some areas of the country. On Thursday, the government announced almost £900m of additional funding over the next two years to tackle these growing pressures.
“However, we know that money alone is not the solution. There is a diversity of provision across councils, with many already providing high-quality social care services within existing budgets.
“The prime minister is clear that we need to find a long-term sustainable solution, including making sure all local authorities learn from the best performers to raise standards across the whole system.”
One of the NHS’s most senior doctors warned last week that what he called an inadequate response to the “national crisis” of social care threatened to “tip the NHS over the edge this winter”.
Dr Mark Holland, the president of the Society for Acute Medicine, claimed that raising the council tax precept for social care was “too little too late” given the scale of the problem.
