Procrastination isn’t just the thief of time. It can also be a thief of lives… as well as public money, writes Tony Watts OBE
Regular readers of my daily news digest “Later Life AGEnda” will be (all too) familiar with my diatribes on the challenges facing the “three-legged stool” of our health, housing and care systems, but a particular theme has been coming to the fore recently: Government procrastination.
It’s coming up (symbolically) to nine months since the new Government took over the reins, a moment when many of us breathed a sigh of relief thinking that the stasis that had blighted the last few years of the previous administration might get blown away with the cobwebs.
In particular, there were high hopes that the nettle of social care reform would (finally) be grasped, and that the Old People’s Housing Taskforce report (submitted on the day when the General Election was announced) would be implemented… so releasing much-needed family homes for the rest of the population.
Even that the accessible housing standards which have been gathering dust in the in-tray of the merry-go-rounds of previous Housing Ministers might be used as a template to equip our housing stock for our ageing society.
It all started pretty well. But since then, the only audible sounds being emitted from Whitehall have been the all-too-familiar clunk of cans being kicked further and further down the road.
Baroness Casey, all agreed, was an excellent choice to lead the independent commission on social care reform. But the timeline given for the commission means that nothing meaningful will happen this side of the next General Election. Meanwhile, the sector lurches from crisis to crisis… preventing any meaningful progress within the NHS.
The Government’s avowed intent is to get Britain working again, but with so many people laid off work from long term illnesses, that is unlikely to happen any time soon: the logjam begins with social care and related issues such as delayed hospital discharges.
The Government’s response to the mounting benefits bill hasn’t been to address long term sickness but to take the benefits away – including, according to Carers UK, from at least 650,000 of unpaid carers who will now miss out on carer’s allowance, and face grinding poverty as a result. And what about accessibility standards… another potential quick, cheap win for the Government, ensuring that every new mainstream house is designed to standards that would enable people to remain living in them independently for longer?
Lord Best has recently gone on record as saying: “Many charities – not least the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Habinteg housing association – have campaigned for the full Lifetime Homes regulations for many years. But since the government announced its intention to act, over 300,000 properties have been built that do not accord with M4(2); every further month we await the consultation, another 13,000 are built to inferior accessibility standards.”
Meanwhile, the comprehensive report from the Older People’s Housing Taskforce, which would sow the seeds for specialist housing to achieve its potential, remains in the Housing Minister’s in-tray, and there are no signs that older people’s housing has any priority status in the Government’s plans to build 1.5 million new homes.
Implementing these measures would require relatively little effort or investment, and between them they could be transformative. Quite why the Government is delaying any of them is, frankly, baffling.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
