Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have been challenged to sign up to cross-party talks finally resolving the impasse over social care, as part of a Liberal Democrat plea to “grasp the nettle” after years of failure.
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, said that his party would include in its forthcoming manifesto a promise to attend cross-party talks on social care after the election. He called on both the Tories and Labour to do the same in a bid to agree a financial package that helps the NHS and deals with the high costs some face.
“We’ve got lots of ideas to bring to the table,” Davey told the Observer. “But we’re only going to ultimately solve this if we have a cross-party consensus. It’s just been knocked out for far too long. We need to do it right this time. We cannot wait.
“Come to the table. Put in your manifestos – everybody – that you will take part in cross-party talks after the election for a cross-party agreement on social care. We can therefore come up with something that will stand the test of time. This is a long-term policy with a massive impact on the NHS. There are issues on how it’s financed and we’d have to all agree on that, too. I don’t think there’s any other way of doing it. I just hope Sunak and Starmer will respond positively. Let’s grasp the nettle. Let’s crack it.”
Several pledges to deal with the huge social care costs faced by many families have been made in recent years, with both Boris Johnson and Theresa May promising solutions that were never implemented. Private cross-party talks before the 2010 election also broke down.
It comes after the main parties were recently told to “grow up” by Sir Andrew Dilnot, whose government-backed commission proposed a cap on social care costs more than a decade ago. He said there had been “no serious addressing” of the state of the care system by Labour or the Conservatives heading into the election campaign.
Davey said he had been disappointed by suggestions that Labour wanted to “park” the issue until well after the election. He said that some of the ideas he would bring to the talks would be a special national minimum wage for care workers and more help for family carers. “They actually save the taxpayer huge amounts of money,” he said. “They want to do it. If you gave them a bit of extra support, such as a bit of respite care, it’d be more sustainable. More would do it and they’d be able to do it for longer.”
Davey was speaking ahead of this weekend’s Lib Dem spring conference. He said that there was now the real chance of a “once in a generation” election that saw a complete Tory collapse.
He said that his party’s hopes were growing that both the chancellor Jeremy Hunt and levelling up secretary Michael Gove could be unseated. Both cabinet ministers have seats in Surrey, part of the “blue wall” of previously safe Tory heartlands that the Lib Dems have been focusing on under Davey.
The Lib Dems have been stagnant in the polls at around 10% for some time, with some criticising the party for being overtaken by Reform UK, the successor to the Brexit party. However, Davey said Reform was only a threat to the Tories and byelection victories showed his targeted campaign was working. He said he felt a “moral responsibility to make sure we beat lots of Conservative MPs”.
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“I’ve noticed over my time that if leaders focus on vote share across the whole country and ignore seats, they perform badly at the election,” he said. “I am not going to do that. If you have a strategy that is focused on the seats where you can win, and you don’t allow yourself to be taken off by criticism, frankly, I think we will do what we need to do. We’re going to play an absolutely central role in removing the Conservatives.”
He denied the criticism he had received over the Horizon scandal had hampered his leadership. He was criticised after it emerged he had initially refused to meet Alan Bates, the former postmaster and campaigner fighting for justice, when he was Post Office minister during the coalition government.
“Liberal Democrat leader in election year gets attacked by the Conservative press shocker,” he said. “It’s a huge miscarriage of justice and we need to play our part in getting justice for the postmasters. They need exoneration, they need compensation. The inquiry needs to learn the lessons and we need to change things big time.”