May 3, 2019

Funding care of elderly the new political battle ground – comment from law firm RWK Goodman

The proposals follow the Labour party announcing £350m of funding training of staff to better help those in care and promises to reverse recent government spending cuts.

Mei-Ling Huang, a Partner in the specialist Social Care team at the law firm RWK Goodman whose clients include care providers said: “The Conservative’s proposals are likely to fall well short of the funding the sector needs, but do suggest a party prepared to think differently about the long term funding of social care.  I suspect this is very much a case of the party testing the waters with further proposals to follow.

“The Labour party, somewhat surprisingly and disappointingly, have fallen short in their proposals, which at first blush, seem not to understand the scale of the problem.  Simply dismissing the Conservative proposals as a ‘tax on getting old’ is cheap political point scoring that will do nothing to better the care of our growing elderly population.”

Mei-Ling adds: “We are still waiting the Government’s long-overdue Green Paper on social care and while this week’s announcement is unlikely to herald its imminent arrival it does give us a flavour of what we might expect.”

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