Labour needs the will to solve social care crisis | Letters

A royal commission on the future of social care (Editorial, 3 December) would be yet another example of how successive governments have kicked the care can further down the road. Older and disabled people, and their families, are desperate for the government to sort out the care crisis once and for all. With its large majority, it has a chance to be bold and take decisive action that would benefit every family across the country – in the same way that it has acted to reform the railways. Care is an equally important part of our national and local infrastructure.

Learning from Labour councils like Hammersmith & Fulham, free personal care could be the basis for a fairer, simpler and sustainable national care service. It just requires political will.
Sally Powell and Stephen Burke
Former Labour councillors, London borough of Hammersmith & Fulham

Your editorial rightly emphasises the urgency of finding a solution to the sustainability of social care responses to rising needs.

But nothing significant will be achieved without finding answers to two crucial issues. First, NHS services are provided free at the point of need, while social care provision is means-tested to a very low level. None of the solutions posed so far have addressed fully this fundamental difference.

Second, the NHS is nationally determined and, in the main, delivered in-house. Social care services are commissioned by local authorities and mainly delivered by private and charitable suppliers.

Unless a holistic, accessible and transparent system of health and care responses is available to people in need and their families, no long-lasting solution is possible.
John Ransford
Group chief executive, Local Government Association, 2009-12