Social care

But I also take the big decisions that they have avoided for many years.

And let me go directly to one, directly to one, social care.

I grasped the nettle in a way that nobody on their side ever has.

And I made a difficult spending decision to lay a path towards a national care service.

Have they had the time to read the COVID inquiry report? yesterday about the appalling state of social care as it went into the pandemic the hundreds of thousands of british people who suffered as a result of that the lives that were lost i need no lectures from the other side about taking tough decisions on social care i suggest they go away from this pmqs read that report and have a period of reflection

That's Prime Minister sounding quite cross there.

Cindy, look, that's a fairly devastating line about spending more on borrowing than on interests, more on interest than on the school and army and police combined.

But I guess the substance of that question is, and indeed answer, is Kemi Badenoch saying you can take the little decisions about music on trains, but you can't take the big decisions about, you know, hefty cuts, hefty spending.

About 30% of this goes on pensions and welfare and nearly 20% on the NHS.

Defence spending is pledged to increase and the government is considering expensive proposals to fund social care.

Funding is raised through taxation and borrowing.

with government debt currently standing at 95% of gross domestic product.

We are in a series now on a mucky business, looking at Andy Burnham's speech at the Labour Party conference, which we concluded, Rob Hutton and I, in the conversation last week was a really great bit of oratory.

We'd like to now know what it actually meant.

And some of the focus of the speech and perhaps the most moving parts of it were Andy Burnham referencing his now late father, Roy, and his experience of social care and Andy Burnham's passion and desire to reform social care.

And indeed, one of the ways, indeed, maybe the way he said he might be able to pay for that was by doing something to the triple lock.

And joined with me in the studio is my brother, Sabah Zafar.

And today we will be speaking on the topics in the first hour, which is social care.

And in the second hour, we will be speaking on the topic of bone health.

So Sabah, you know, before I think we do kickstart, first and foremost, of course, all the listeners out there, they can also be part of this interactive discussion by calling our WhatsApp, which is 0208 687 7878.

So, Sabah, before we obviously kickstart, just for our listeners as well, just to obviously give them some numbers as well.

And when we are speaking about social care, what we are actually referring to, you know from obviously from my perspective or from my understanding you know social care we are speaking about we are you know talking about anything where we are looking looking after our you know fellow human beings right and of course that could be you know anything referring to you know whether we have the nhs system within the uk we're looking at right or whether It could be looking after the elderly as such, anybody that's vulnerable and so on.

But social care, of course, is something that is extremely important.

It is something that everyone requires at some point in their life.

And I think that that part of the population can be increased and it can be increased in part by increasing the number of people who are employed as carers.

So I'm quite interested in the Andy Burnham idea to have a universal social care service, because this would create jobs in social care that would facilitate more people being out of the labor force.

So right now there's this view that there's a set of people in the UK who have disabilities but aren't recognized as having disabilities in such a way that they receive government provided social care.

So insofar as they get this care, they have to pay for it.

And this is causing people to become destitute or it's causing people to try to be in the labor force who really can't functionally be in it.

And so if you create a universal social care service, then these people can safely drop out of the labor force.

There's no longer a pressure to find a way to employ them.

And you can create jobs for the social carers.

And that is because we have a care system that puts profit before people, leaving behind not only the people who depend on this service, but the incredible people who work within it as well.

So can I, as a Labour and cooperative MP, ask our country's first Labour and cooperative Prime Minister whether he'll consider a cooperative approach to social care so we can finally put people before profit?

[cheers]

Prime Minister.

Well, Mr.

Speaker, can I thank him, uh, for his kind words, and can I pass on my sympathies in relation to, uh, his grandparents.

Any family in this country who has lived through the, the journey, um, through dementia and, uh, experiencing the social care system will know that we should not accept the status quo.

And the failure of this House to fix social care through the decades, uh, bodes, uh, does not reflect well on any, uh, party in this House.

Did the Russians interfere? We're gonna be talking about Ukraine and defense.

How are they gonna get to the level of defense spending that we need? And what is going to happen on pensions? What is gonna happen on the triple lock, and how are they gonna fund social care, and when is the National Care Service going to start? We're gonna talk about Manchester City, big scandal brewing.

We're gonna be talking about him, his faith, his family, his emotion, and we're gonna be asking how did he become Prime Minister? Why did the Starmer project fail in the way that it did? All this and more coming up with me and Rory and Andy Burnham.

This episode is presented by IG.

That doesn't, in my view, leave us in a, a position where we're ready to face the future.

So it's about resilience first and foremost, but then, you know, all the way up to defense at the national, at the national level, and we're gonna have to be really honest about that.

In the same way that I was honest about social care, and we can't turn away from that, nor can we turn away from the questions of the defense of the realm.

Um, one of the things that really hits resilience is the AI revolution.

We do recognize that not all people can use the technologies and some people do need to speak to a human.

Okay, so let's move on to a bit of a hot topic around social care.

We know that you've done quite a bit of work on using Soft Dynamics 365.

Interesting sort of soundbite that we've picked up from you, Andy, is that you've actually designed that by staff for staff.

Just talk us through a little bit more around why that's important to you.

I suppose when we started this conversation, I said sometimes you've got to take a little bit of risk and make really brave decisions.

So I fundamentally looked at social care and it's a real complex service and serving some of our most vulnerable within the city.

So something we can't get wrong.

But where should we draw the line between using AI to help an officer and allowing the technology to influence who gets through the door? We'll hear from the authors of a new book, AI Use Cases for Consular Affairs, about what happens when algorithms become part of the visa process.

And then we turn to social care.

A new project called Narrative Voice is exploring whether AI can help capture the stories of care experience young adults and turn those experiences into evidence for policymakers, ultimately bringing change and improvements to current systems faster.

Could AI help researchers hear more voices and spot patterns humans might otherwise miss? Or could it introduce new biases and lose the human context behind the stories? This is Somewhere on Earth, where tech meets humanity.

Void where prohibited.

Visit spinquest.com for more details.

What happens when you take someone's own experience and turn it into research? For many people involved in social care research, the process is still remarkably human.

Researchers talk to people, conduct interviews, take notes or transcripts, analyze what they've heard, identify themes, and eventually turn those conversations into a report that policymakers can use.

Uh, you can look this up.

Green Party calling for free social care for all the over sixty-fives.

Um, you know, I have to go back to the old phrase, Greens lead, others follow, usually after a ten-year period.

[laughs]

Um, but I think the other thing is, actually, the next day on Five Live, I was talking about this, and I hadn't really thought about this beforehand.

But I pointed out that he said not a word about immigration.

But a huge amount of our social care workforce are immigrants, many of whom will be affected by, uh, Sham-Burnham-Hammond's proposed changes, um, that people could have to be here for fifteen years before they get permanent leave to remain, which just destroys the whole model of where our workforce is gonna come from.

So, you know, I think what Andy Burnham has done, and we're seeing this much more broadly, you know, he picked three policy areas.

Unless he's really thick.

Because he thinks that he can get money back from social care, right? Right.

No, isn't this supposed to pay for social care? It's the other way around.

The savings from the state pension are going to pay for social

care.

Makes

sense.

New social care service.