Centralised Approach for a National Care Service would be a “Disaster” Warns Ex-Care Minister Norman Lamb
Former Care Minister Norman Lamb has expressed concern about the creation of a standalone National Care Service, saying it would be a “disaster” if it was centralised.
The ex-Liberal Democrat MP issued the warning in the second episode of a new podcast series – The Fix with Ravi Gurumurthy – from Nesta, the research and innovation foundation.
When asked about Andy Burnham’s plans to set up the service in the next Parliament, Mr Lamb – who oversaw social care in the coalition government from 2012 to 2015 – said he was “slightly nervous” about the idea because of a lack of clarity on what it would look like. He went on: “If it’s a set of standards and expectations that everyone feels they will get, that’s fine; if we try to organise things in a similar way to the NHS from the centre, that would be a disaster”.
The Fix sees Nesta’s CEO Ravi Gurumurthy welcoming some of the most prominent people in British society – from politics, industry and beyond – to discuss the biggest challenges facing the country and how they’d solve them.
In the latest episode focused on how to fix social care, Norman Lamb said he wanted to see a combined “health and care service” instead of separate services “sitting alongside each other”, with providers working together on a local level to a set of national guidelines. He praised Andy Burnham for seeking to build “cross-party consensus” but added: “Whatever they come up with has got to be sustainable, otherwise we go back into an awful process of another government coming in and ending it so you lose public support for it”.
The former minister welcomed the Prime Minister’s intention to make personal care free at the point of use, but warned care home patients would continue to see “horrendously high” costs because they’d still be required to cover their board and lodgings.
Mr Lamb went on to question whether the current inspection regime was having the desired impact in improving care standards. He said: “At the moment you spend a lot of money on inspections (by) people who don’t really know (a) service particularly well. I think it’s quite questionable how much difference they’ve made. I’m not saying dispense with all sorts of inspection and regulation but I think there’s a danger we assume that it can shift cultures, and I don’t think it really does”.
The ex-Lib Dem minister also called for a more compassionate approach to patient care throughout the system following the suicide of his sister Catherine in 2015. He said: “She went into a mental health unit and she was locked up, even though she was a voluntary patient. We expect people to recover in a place that is generally not very therapeutic and I think it’s remarkably stupid. There was a load of public money spent on Catherine but what good did it do?”
Norman Lamb’s conversation with Ravi Gurumurthy on The Fix from Nesta is available today, Wednesday 4 November, with new episodes released fortnightly on all main podcast platforms and YouTube. Former Business Secretary Peter Kyle was the first guest on the series while future topics will include housing and energy prices.
