Costs are spiralling, with many local councils forced to dedicate the vast majority of their budgets to it. At the same time, more and more families are seeing their savings disappear into the black hole of nursing home fees. With an ageing population, the problem is set to get worse.
In only his second week as prime minister, Andy Burnham pledged to succeed where so many of his predecessors have failed: by fixing Britain’s social care system. And yet, as parliament returns from recess, the new-ish administration is still worryingly unclear about how it will do this. Despite Burnham declaring that care workers should enjoy better compensation, we don’t know how he plans to pay for any of it – not least because he has kept Starmer’s campaign pledge to not raise income tax, VAT or national insurance.
At the moment, it looks as though it will be impossible to square the circle. What the government needs is big, innovative ideas. We should look to history for inspiration, while also absorbing the lessons of past mistakes.
How about national service – but instead of entering the military, recruits are pledged to the NHS? Eye-catching, but ultimately not right, at least not in that form. Forcing young people to do work they’d prefer not to, when there isn’t even an enemy at the gates, will only lead to bad results.
Indeed, the army has already learned this: compulsory recruits in the postwar period were typically unmotivated and incompetent; a drag rather than a boost to the military’s performance. But that’s a crude precedent. We can take more relevant inspiration from elsewhere.
For example, young men in Austria who do not wish to serve in the military can instead opt for health or social care work; many end up driving ambulances. The trade-off is that they do nine months instead of six. In Norway, conscientious objectors were, until 2012, able to perform “civilian national service”, working in community settings such as primary schools or nursing homes, and accruing points towards university entry for doing so.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
