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United States Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson handed responsibility for social ...
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson and health and social care secretary Wes Streeting (credit: Labour Party)
Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson have been handed responsibility for social care in the Labour government, after it took power today.
Prime minister Keir Starmer has appointed both to the cabinet roles mirroring the briefs they held in opposition.
Streeting has become health and social care secretary, giving him responsibility for the NHS and adult social care.
Phillipson, meanwhile, has been appointed education secretary, a role that has oversight for children’s social care, as well as early years, schools, further and higher education and apprenticeships.
As for their Conservative predecessors, a key question facing both Streeting and Phillipson is the degree of attention they will confer on social care compared with the more politically salient elements of their briefs: the NHS in Streeting’s case and schools and childcare in Phillipson’s.
Social care not among Labour ‘missions’
Unlike social care – for adults or children – these policy areas feature in the five “missions” that Labour has set as its key priorities as well as the six “first steps” the party has laid out as its initial actions for government.
Streeting and Phillipson’s priorities
- NHS mission: Build an NHS fit for the future that is there when people need it; with fewer lives lost to the biggest killers; in a fairer Britain, where everyone lives well for longer.
- NHS first step: Cut NHS waiting times with 40,000 more appointments each week, during evenings and weekends, paid for by cracking down on tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes.
- Education and childcare mission: Break down barriers to opportunity by reforming our childcare and education systems, to make sure there is no class ceiling on the ambitions of young people in Britain.
- Education first step: Recruit 6,500 new teachers in key subjects to set children up for life, work and the future, paid for by ending tax breaks for private schools.
Labour’s election manifesto did include a number of policies on adult social care – notably establishing a fair pay agreement for care workers, in order to improve their terms and conditions – however, it allocated no funding to any of them.
Though not included in the manifesto, Streeting also confirmed in interviews that the party was committed to introducing the previous government’s planned adult social care charging reforms – including a cap on care costs – by the planned implementation date of October 2025.
However, according to think-tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Conservative government allocated no funding to this, so Labour would have to find the money for this. This is difficult given the new government’s commitments not to raise the main rates of income tax, VAT and national insurance and also be on course to cut public debt, as a proportion of GDP, over the medium-term.
Limited children’s social care offer
On children’s social care, the party’s manifesto offer was much more limited than it was for adults’ services.
The only substantive commitments being to strengthen regulation of the sector and improve inter-agency information sharing by creating unique identifiers for children and families, but Labour provided very little detail on either.
