Social care can kicked down the road. In July 2019, the Prime Minister promised his Government would “fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared”. But a plan for social care was missing from last week’s Queen’s Speech, which set out the Government’s legislative agenda for this year.
~~Response. Care organisations have been left “extremely disappointed” by the lack of announcements on social care last week. NHS Confederation Chief Executive Danny Mortimer says: “The NHS and social care are sister services – if one suffers so does the other – and the Covid-19 pandemic has shown how fragile and in dire need of reform England’s social care system has become… reform must no longer be delayed”.
What’s the delay? Politico reports that the hold-up is due to disagreement over how a new social care regime would be paid for (a question not covered by February’s White Paper setting out proposals for a Health and Care Bill either).
Spending cuts and rising demand. Between 2010 and 2019, spending per person on adult social care fell by 12%,while demand has increased due to an ageing population and the rising prevalence of disability – and more recently due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Care spending as investment. The Women’s Budget Group (WBG) argues that chronic underspending on care reflects a gender bias in economic policy-making, and calls for such spending to be seen as investment in social infrastructure to counter this.
~~Biden’s shift on social infrastructure. In line this approach, President Biden treated care as infrastructure spending in his American Jobs Plan, allocating $400bn to investment in care and health systems (see our summary and analysis here).
~~Care as stimulus. Previous analysis from the Women’s Budget Group estimated that investing in care as part of an economic stimulus package would provide almost three times as many jobs than the equivalent investment in construction.
Care workers. Central to the problem is the undervaluing of care work. On a Health Foundation podcast on why care is undervalued, commoditised and ignored, Professor of Nursing Policy Anne Marie Rafferty argued “every part of the care labour force is desperately underpaid, chronically underpaid, because of this fundamental cultural distortion in which we don't recognise a form of emotional labour that can be enormously demanding”. (Episode with transcript here)
Blueprint for reform. The Women’s Budget Group Commission on a Gender-Equal Economy has laid out the roadmap for a creation of a “Caring Economy", including recommendations both for particular public services (e.g. including a Universal Care Service) and for how public services are treated within the UK’s broader economic policy framework, ending the chronic undervaluing of care.
~~Health and care. The King’s Fund has published “five priorities for health and care” as part of the “road to renewal” for the health and care system considering together.
~~An industrial strategy for care. CLES's Isaac Stanley and Common Wealth's Adrienne Buller and Mathew Lawrence released a report outlining a people-centred industrial strategy for a care-led recovery in England. The report is backed by UNISON and the TUC calls for councils ending the use of private care providers, a living wage for care workers and properly funding care through progressive taxation. (Independent coverage here)
~~Childcare. The New Economics Foundation has made the case for a Childcare Infrastructure Fund to sustain the childcare sector in the face of both Covid-related and longer-term pressures.
Weekly Updates
Democracy
Queen’s speech. 30 pieces of legislation were outlined in the State Opening of Parliament last week, including a Planning Bill, Environment Bill, Skills and Post-16 Education Bill, Health and Care Bill, Procurement Bill, Dormant Assets Bill, a Levelling Up White Paper and more.
New peer-reviewed research on degrowth. A landmark article published in journal Nature Communications argues that the IPCC and associated climate modellers should consider pathways to emissions reduction involving ‘degrowth’ in rich countries, and is the first comprehensive comparison of degrowth pathways with established emissions reduction scenarios. (Twitter thread from paper author)
~~Why degrowth? Established climate scenarios rely on risky assumptions around “controversial negative emissions and unprecedented technological change” to deliver emissions reductions in combination with GDP growth. A degrowth approach, it is argued, would reduce the reliance on untested and potentially unfeasible technologies in limiting warming.
~~UK techno-optimism. Last month the Government announced a new emissions target in line with the Committee for Climate Change’s (CCC) advice (Carbon Brief summary). But the Government has not followed the CCC’s policy recommendations, particularly around politically difficult topics such as reducing meat consumption and other behavioural changes, instead emphasising “new green technologies”. BusinessGreen’s James Murray argues that the Government cannot rely on such “techno-optimism” to meet its targets, and must instead show political leadership and policy development on trickier areas of the transition to net zero.
Local financing of solar panels. Torbay Council outlined plans for a £1m community green bond, the third local authority to launch a scheme for local people to invest in environmentally friendly projects in their area.
Welfare, public services and inequalities
Social guarantee. New site SocialGuarantee.org sets out a policy framework in which every person’s access to life’s essentials is enshrined as a right and delivered through reimagined public services. The site curates a range of resources, including examples of best practice from around the world in provision of services such as adult social care, transport, housing, internet access, and childcare. (Launch video)
Levelling-up and structural shifts in the labour market. Economist Professor Jonathan Portes examined the roots of UK regional inequality in the context of the Government’s levelling-up agenda.
Adult skills ‘revolution’. The Independent’s Ben Chu evaluated the government’s adult skills ‘revolution’ following legislation for a “lifetime skills guarantee” announced in the Queen’s speech, concluding that it is “as it stands, only a pretty sketchy and financially under-powered adult skills reform programme”, where “delivery on adult skills (and funding) will perhaps be the acid test of Boris Johnson’s oft-repeated claims to be levelling up the UK” (Twitter thread summary).
Housing
The political effects of unequal asset ownership. Author and academic Keir Milburn featured in a short video for Sheffield’s Festival of Debate, concisely explaining the political generation gap rooted in the diverging material interests of the young and old, mediated by property ownership: “The material interests of older cohorts might be leading some of them to look away from the pressing crises of the present.”
Addressing the housing crisis through a Land Commission. Over 50 organisations, including housing and climate groups, trade unions and charities, have signed an open letter to Andy Burnham calling for a democratic approach to managing public land in Greater Manchester.
Fiscal policy and human rights. The Centre for Economic and Social Rights and a number of Latin American and Caribbean policy experts have developed a set of Principles for Human Rights in Fiscal Policy. They argue this is a “ground-breaking normative tool that distills the key human rights principles applicable to tax and budget policies and translates them into more concrete guidelines for the design, implementation, and assessment of fiscal policies”.
US moves against tax havens. 97 Nonprofit organisations across the world signed Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition’s petition to support the Disclosure of Tax Havens and Offshoring Act, a piece of US legislation to require large PLCs to disclose accounts data on a country-by-country basis to shine a spotlight on tax avoidance.
UK resisting US global minimum corporate tax. The FT reported that Rishi Sunak is “holding back support for Joe Biden’s plans for a 21 per cent minimum global business tax rate”. Tax Justice UK Director Robert Palmer argued the move was “not a good look” for a government with a stated commitment to tackling tax avoidance and argued Biden’s proposals could be a “game-changer”.
~~International alignment. The OECD is overseeing a forum to overhaul the international tax architecture and coordinate national tax proposals to prevent arbitrage and a race to the bottom. The Economist argued that “Tax authorities should do away with the fiction that intangible capital can be priced accurately through transfer pricing and instead try to reflect where activity takes place, by looking at sales and where employees are.”
BoE speech on Central Bank Digital Currency. Sir Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor of Financial Stability at the Bank of England, gave a speech on the future of publicly-issued money in a world of crypto-currencies: “we are seeing accelerating changes in the way we live and transact that will greatly reduce and perhaps eventually eliminate the role that public money plays in the economy today".
