'My dad has Alzheimer's, I know the pain of collapsing social care - we've all failed to deal with it,' says Burnham

Andy Burnham says he is facing the strife known by many families battling the country's collapsing social care system, as his father lives with Alzheimer’s disease. But all political parties have failed to ‘grasp the nettle’, say candidates for Greater Manchester’s mayoral elections.

Bolton GP and chair of the Bolton GP Federation, Dr Kamran Khan, asked the hopeful mayors how they would improve social care and raise its standing in communities given the NHS’ widespread financial and resource crisis. Labour’s Andy Burnham told of how he knew of the frustrations faced by many with his ‘dad, who has Alzheimer’s’.

Mr Burnham lamented that ‘14 years ago’, he put forward a ‘national care service’ plan in Westminster while he was still health secretary but it did not materialise. “If you don’t have simple, good care in people’s homes, you end up dragging down the NHS with too many people in hospital who get stuck there and then can’t come out, and then you get overloaded primary care,” he said.

“Social care is preventative care and the continued collapse of it is now being felt in the health service every day. There is only one answer, the political parties have to show courage on this issue and fix social care properly – and I put forward a plan for that 14 years ago.”

READ MORE: Greater Manchester mayor hustings LIVE: Candidates quizzed by M.E.N. readers

Readers of the Manchester Evening News, first time voters and campaigners put their questions to five candidates hoping to be elected mayor on May 2. Candidates from all five parties in the race for Greater Manchester mayor took part in the hustings at the M.E.N. headquarters this afternoon (April 18). The candidates taking part include Labour's Andy Burnham, Conservative candidate Laura Evans, the Green Party's Hannah Spencer, Liberal Democrat Jake Austin and Reform UK's Dan Barker.

Tory candidate Laura Evans agreed with Mr Burnham, saying 'he's right' that social care needs more attention: "Health care is devolved in Greater Manchester, £6.5bn a year roughly comes into Greater Manchester to work on that.

“Hubs are opening up… where we bring it back more localised. But it’s a massive issue.

“I don’t think Covid helped, because I think actually on a government level they would have done something early doors to deal with this. We can’t keep running away from it, people are living longer, therefore health care providers are going to be more drawn upon.

“But within GM you do have quite a lot of power, I would like to make sure we have much more integrated, joined up thinking. Some of the stumbling blocks are things like certain people aren’t allowed to read certain people’s records.

“You go through the same motions over and over again, they’re not integrated, they don’t work well together. Things like that could be fixed.”

The Green Party's Hannah Spencer said that the social care sector is a ‘really difficult place to work and to keep staff’ because ‘pressures are so high’ and ‘staff are not paid enough’ – especially to live in a city-region where cost-of-living has seen major increases. “People come into the job with a really good mindset and, often, they don’t have the time to spend with clients, they have to rush to the next job.

“It means that they can’t deliver the care they would like to to individual people.”

Jake Austin said social care ‘has not been preventative for a long time’, adding: “Local authorities over the last decade or so have really struggled to be able to support their local care services because of cutbacks to their budgets.”

Local authorities have been forced to go into ‘crisis mode’, where they can ‘only afford to operate when someone is in a crisis situation in social care’.

‘Resetting that wheel’ comes from pressure on government to allow local authorities to spend more than they do with the money that they’ve got, as well as using the latest technology to put social care back on a preventative path, said the Liberal Democrat candidate.

Reform’s Dan Barker called social care a ‘national issue’, saying: “All parties haven’t grasped the nettle on this, the reason is because it’s going to be so unpopular because there’s only two ways you can do this that I can see.

“You can increase taxes because we've got an ageing population, all the Baby Boomers now are in this situation – including my own mother. The alternative is that those who can pay, instead of ring fencing their assets so they can pass something on to their children, those assets are used to pay for their care.

“That to me seems fairer, and I’m not a socialist by any definition of the word, but it seems unfair to burden the taxpayer when you’ve got resources for something like an end-of-life care package. I don’t see that the mayoral [office] can have any real impact on that, I think it’s going to happen at a national level. But ultimately, people are going to have to pay more tax for this.”