Press Office of Ashton Edwards

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Ashton Edwards
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Re: Press Office of Ashton Edwards

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Ashton Edwards Takes Aim on Government Budget: A Huge Missed Opportunity on Social Care

WESTMINSTER - Ashton Edwards, MP for Kensington and Shadow Health and Social Affairs Secretary, slammed the Government's budget as a "missed opportunity" to deal with the urgent emergency on social care, saying that the "big investments" promoted by the Government don't seem to live up to the lofty promises made to address social care. The Government had originally made social care reform a priority; one former Health and Social Care Secretary had talked about a goal of a reform package by 2019 and another Secretary had said there would be "a new framework" starting in 2021. In his initial address, the Prime Minister pledged his dedication to fund and to strengthen social care.

But despite these lofty promises, the Government has allocated absolutely no money to social care.

"The Tories have pulled £7 billion now out of social care funding for local authorities since 2010. This has left hundreds of thousands of people who should otherwise receive support for care with nothing, it's sent people to the NHS for life-threatening conditions that could have been addressed if the Tories had just supported already existing programs. With all these promises to actually act on social care, I was hoping we could see some progress in addressing funding needs. On behalf of every adult that could benefit from social care investments, I'm saddened that this was a huge missed opportunity," said Edwards.

While Edwards has put forward a plan for a National Care Service- funding for which is already earmarked in Labour's budget proposal to start improving access to care for millions- he said he didn't expect the Government to adopt his plans. But given the Tories are proud about their "day-to-day" surplus, that not a pound of it could go to social care needs was a failure in leadership.

"This Government claims that they've been able to build a day-to-day surplus of billions of billions of pounds. That's the kind of funding that could go to supporting social care, and instead there's not a mention of that at all in their budget address. Social care is in a crisis right now. It's not something that would be nice to have, but for the health and quality of life for pensioners, for adults with disabilities, we need a lot more than we're seeing now," Edwards said.
Ashton Edwards MP
MP for Kensington (2017-) | Labour
Shadow Foreign Secretary (2020-2021)
Shadow Health and Social Affairs Secretary (2020-2021)
Shadow Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary (2019-2021)

Shadow Health, Education and Social Care Secretary (2019-2020)
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