Wake up, politicians! Disabled people rely on social care too – not just older people
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Version 0 of 1. Millions of people with disabilties rely on carers to help them get out of bed, wash and go to the toilet. Their needs must not be ignored in this election, says Guardian columnist Frances Ryan I can’t help but wonder what the social care equivalent of the well-worn NHS general election photo op would be. Instead of health secretaries putting on scrubs and a party leader looking sympathetic next to a patient’s bedside, perhaps Boris Johnson would like to wait with a paraplegic as she soils herself in her front room because she has no assistant to help her get to the toilet. If that seems uncomfortable, it should: 1.5 million disabled and older people are going without help to get out of bed or wash in a system that experts have long warned is “on the brink of collapse”. Since 2010, nearly £8bn has been cut from council adult social care budgets, during a time of growing demand. The consequences are like something out of a horror show: disabled people told to wear adult nappies, put to bed at 6pm or left housebound 24/7. Others now have to choose between care hours and food as they are forced to pay sky-high care charges themselves. This is not so much a public policy issue as a full-blown humanitarian crisis. For my book, Crippled, I spent two years talking to some of the casualties of austerity, and few stood out more than social care users. Rachel, a wheelchair user and former nurse, had lived in her bungalow with the help of a team of carers for years until her cash-strapped council cut her care hours. She now has no support at all. Unable to cook meals, she is clinically malnourished. Without someone to help her into bed at night, on her worst days Rachel sleeps fully clothed in her wheelchair. It is an almost unfathomable level of neglect, and one that is somehow being permitted as the new normal. We are living in an era of the brazen, broken safety net: people have an urgent need, the state doesn’t meet it, and that is apparently OK. It has now been almost 1,000 days since the government first claimed it would set out a social care green paper. It would be easy to blame this impasse on Brexit – and that’s certainly played its part – but it’s also down to a general inertia. The Institute for Fiscal Studies warned on Monday that adult social care will need billions more in fundingover the course of the next parliament. If the NHS is a political football, social care has been kicked well over the goalpost. The social care crisis is in many ways unappealing politics. It is expensive and will probably require making the tough case for increased taxation. There are also no easy answers because it needs complex and long-term solutions. Theresa May’s disastrous “dementia tax” at the last election is a warning to any politician who’s considering pitching ill-thought-out social care reforms while trying to win votes. Labour has already proposed free personal care for over-65s, with an eye on expanding it to working-age disabled people. That the Conservatives in the Queen’s speech yet again only mentioned older people who need social care does not bode well for disabled people. All eyes will be on the major party’s manifestos to see their pledges. While NHS funding is seen as life and death, social care is what can make life worth living: the right to choose our day, to feel dignity at home and to be out in the world. In this election, it’s safe to say that politicians have disabled people’s futures in their hands. • Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist and author of Crippled: Austerity and the Demonisation of Disabled People |