10 October 2013

The Care Bill presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for disabled rights

The Care Bill returns to the House of Lords this week. The Government has put down some welcome changes. But political leaders have to be visionary, be bold and think beyond the next election. So do councils – and so, too, do organisations like Scope.

Here’s why social care is so important. Disabled people want to live independently. Sometimes they need support to do so. That could be a personal assistant to help them get up, get washed and dressed. In 2013, I think most people would agree that this support should be in place. But independent living also means disabled people having a say in where they live, who they live with and how they go about their day. This means not being forced to get up the same time every day, eat at the same time every day and go to bed at the same time every day. Again, in 2013, I think most people would back that aspiration. Unfortunately, this doesn’t reflect the reality of many disabled people’s lives.

Take Martyn Sibley, a young disabled internet entrepreneur. He runs Disability Horizons and has just trekked from John o' Groats to Lands’ End in his electric wheelchair. He also still has to argue with his social worker about getting support to go to the toilet. This is unacceptable.

During party conferences Nick Clegg talked-up capping care costs; Ed Miliband backed whole person care and Jeremy Hunt championed integration of health and social care. In the summer the Chancellor found £3.8bn in June’s spending review to start to tackle the crisis.

The Care Bill returns to the House of Lords this week. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reform the care system. The Government has put down some welcome changes. But political leaders have to be visionary, be bold and think beyond the next election. So do councils – and so, too, do organisations like Scope.

I’m Chair of the Care and Support Alliance, a coalition of 75 organisations working together to improve the social care system in this country, so I know how important these issues are for older people, their carers as well. At the moment, there are two fundamental problems.

First, the London School of Economics estimates that 69,000 disabled people who need support to live independently don’t get it. Cash-strapped councils have been upping the bar for eligibility, with 83% of councils now setting the threshold at a higher level than they once did. Under the Government’s plans, all councils could set eligibility at the higher level. Experts say this will leave 105,000 disabled people outside of the system altogether. The Care Bill gives political leaders the chance to be take bold steps to reform the system.

The second problem is that even if you’re lucky enough to be in the system, it can be a struggle to get support that genuinely promotes independent living. In one recent survey, 40% of disabled people said that local care doesn’t meet basic needs like getting up, getting washed and dressed and getting out of the house.

Getting social care reform right will provide the groundwork. But councils need to place independent living at the heart of commissioning. Every disabled people should have a say in what support they receive, and how, when and where they receive it. Meanwhile, organisations like ours can’t just shout from the sidelines. We have to work together to show what’s possible. This means looking to the future, piloting and testing new ways of working, and making tough decisions about the services we provide.

As an example from our own organisation, Scope runs care homes. Our staff do a great job, but many were opened in the 70s, aren’t located in the heart of the community, and are simply not set up to offer disabled people enough choice and control in the 21^st century. In the last five years, Scope has changed or closed ten of these services; last year, we decided to review all of our residential services for disabled adults because of these concerns. We’re now proposing to change or close more over the next three years. This will always be done in consultation with those most affected: disabled people who use them, their families and our staff, and we’ll always do our best to support all of those involved. But if we want to give disabled people the same say over where they live and how they live as everyone else, change is unavoidable.

I believe we can build a society where disabled people can genuinely live independently, but we have to think big. That starts this week with the Care Bill.

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Will the Government put their money where their mouth is? Image: Getty

Richard Hawkes is chief executive of the disability charity Scope.

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Brexit

29 November 2016

Ken Clarke: Angela Merkel is western democracy’s last hope

The former chancellor on how anger defines modern politics, and why Jeremy Corbyn makes him nostalgic for his youth.

Ken Clarke is running late. Backstage at the Cambridge Literary Festival, where the former chancellor is due to speak shortly, his publicist is keeping a watchful eye on the door. Just as watches start to be glanced at, the famously loose-tongued Tory arrives and takes a seat, proclaiming that we have loads of time. He seems relaxed, his suit is loose and slightly creased, and his greying hair flops over his somewhat florid face. His eyes look puffy and slightly tired – the only obvious sign that at 76, retirement is not far off.

Despite his laconic demeanour, the former chancellor says he oscillates between being “angry and depressed at the appalling state politics in the UK has descended into”. After 46 years as an MP for the Nottinghamshire constituency of Rushcliffe, he will not stand for re-election in 2020. His decision was announced in mid-June, just before the Brexit vote. Europe has in many ways defined his long career. He feels sharply the irony that the cause that drew him into politics was the 1961 campaign by Harold Macmillan's government for Britain to gain access to the European Economic Community, as it was then. Now, he will be bidding farewell to Parliament while the country prepares to exit the European Union. “The only consolation I have is that the UK has derived enormous benefits for being in the EU. . . I hope future generations don’t suffer too much with it coming to an end.”

Clarke is here to promote his memoir, A Kind of Blue, for which he received £430,000 – a record for a British politician who has not served as prime minister. The apt title reflects his own status as a Tory maverick as well as his love of jazz hero Miles Davis. He seems to enjoy the attention that book promotion brings – joking with the former Labour home secretary Charles Clarke, who happens also to be speaking at the festival.

Beneath his good humour lies a deep unease about the rise of populist, far-right forces that are rampaging through western liberal democracies from the US to France. “It’s resistance to change, resistance to the modern world and a desire for simple solutions to very complicated political problems,” he says. “The manner in which the political debate is publicised has changed, the mass media is hysterical and competitive and social media is taking over with short soundbites. It has thrown politics into complete confusion.”

Although he cites coverage of the New Statesman’s recent interview with Tony Blair as an example of media hysteria, he is positive about Blair’s intervention: “My understanding [of the interview] was that Tony only wants to play a part in trying to reform centre-left politics, and that’s a good thing . . . I want to see the sensible social democrats win the argument in the Labour party.”

Aware this might sound surprising, given that Labour are his political opponents, he justifies it by stressing the need for a credible opposition capable of putting pressure on the government. Jeremy Corbyn might make him “nostalgic for my youth when there were lots of Sixties lefties”, but it is clear he holds his leadership at least partly responsible for the “total collapse” of the Labour party, which has seen it lose “almost all of its traditional blue-collar base in the north and north midlands to reactionary, prejudiced, right-wing views”.

He is equally scathing of Corbyn's praising of the late Fidel Castro as a “champion of social justice”, after news of the communist dictator's death broke late on Friday night. “[Castro] is a historical throwback to a form of simplistic ultra left-wing orthodoxy . . . He achieved some things in health and education but combined it with an extraordinary degree of cruelty and a denial of human rights.”

Clarke still has one political hero left, though: the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who recently declared she would run again for a fourth term in 2017. He describes her as the only politician succeeding in keeping the traditon of western liberal demcoracy alive. “She is head and shoulders the best politician the western world has produced in the last 10 to 20 years,” he says. If successful, the Christian Democrat would equal the record of her mentor, former chancellor Helmut Kohl, and provide some much-needed stability to European politics.

Less of a hero to him is Theresa May, who he famously referred to as a “bloody difficult woman” in July during an off-camera conversation with Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary, which Sky News recorded. The clip caused a sensation. “I brought great joy to the nation,” he says, chuckling. “My son rang me up laughing his head off, and said it was the first time in my life I’d gone viral on YouTube.”

Today, however, he expresses some sympathy for the tortuous political situation the Prime Minister finds herself in, saying she must have been “startled by the speed” at which she suddenly ascended to the role. He is prepared to give her time to prove that, “she has the remarkable political gifts which will be needed to get the politics of the UK back to some sort of sanity”.

Later, during his talk in the historic debating chamber of the Cambridge Union, a more sentimental side slips out. His wife, Gillian, died 18 months ago. His book is dedicated to her. He rarely discusses his grief, preferring to keep that side of his life private. But when asked to recall his fondest memory of his student days at Cambridge University, he says simply meeting her. “Let me give a corny answer, it is going across to a girl at a [disco], picking her up, getting on quite well and staying married to her for over 50 years,” he says, his voice slightly trailing off, before he recovers, shakes his head, and pours his energy back into politics once more.

Serena Kutchinsky is the digital editor of the New Statesman.