Free healthcare for everyone would never work | Letter

Alan Walker is right to condemn the “low priority given to social care compared to health care” (Letters, 14 August). And yet he praises the work of the Sutherland Royal Commission as “brilliant”.

The Sutherland Commission was a disaster for social care. It wanted to spend vast amounts of money on providing free care to the better off, without addressing the real problem as set out in the minority report that I wrote: grossly inadequate spending on the provision of social care, and in particular the systematic underpayment of our wonderful social care workers.

The result has been 25 years of public wrangling between those who want free healthcare for all, and who want the social care budget to be spent on subsidies for the rich and their inheritances, and those who, like the minority report, want to concentrate on better care, especially for the less well-off.

The new government’s brave announcement that it has abandoned the Tories’ proposals should put an end to that pointless debate, and allow us to get on with designing a social care system that provides adequate support for everyone.
David Lipsey
Labour, House of Lords