Health and Social Care

Health and social care briefing

Years of cuts have left our country with a threadbare health and social care service with overstretched and under-paid staff, and massive unfairness around the ability to live long and healthy lives. The recent strike action by workers in the health service is an evitable consequence of Government underfunding, which has pushed the NHS to breaking point. The Green approach to healthcare means investing in our NHS - a universal, free health service to give individuals the support they need to improve their health, particularly in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. The historic underfunding of social care, worsening mental health crisis and scandalous de-prioritisation of maternity and women’s health are key barriers to this. We understand that a society is one in which childcare is available to all who need it.

3 Greens priorities

Properly fund the NHS: Properly fund the NHS, giving staff proper pay rises to ensure they are fairly remunerated for their essential work.
Free social care: Social care free at the point of use for all adults and putting social care on a par with the NHS.
Childcare for all: 35 hours a week of free childcare for all from the age of nine months to help families with the overwhelming cost of early years care and give parents greater flexibility

Properly fund the NHS

Government underfunding of the NHS has plunged it into a crisis of poor pay, unfilled vacancies, declining working conditions, overworked staff, and stretched capacity.
With pay stagnant - or declining in real terms - and working conditions which mean staff are unable to provide the level of care they feel patients deserve, it is little surprise that there are an estimated 124,000 unfilled vacancies across the NHS. Yet this number of vacancies simply compounds the problems of overworking and under-resourcing.
NHS staff are bearing the brunt of this avoidable crisis, compounded by the increased cost of living. NHS trusts have set up food banks for their staff, and members of the Royal College of Nursing have gone on strike over fair pay for the first time in its history. They have been joined in pay disputes by other essential NHS workers such as junior doctors and ambulance workers.
The Covid-19 pandemic put an unimaginable strain on NHS staff and highlighted once again the vital role that they play in our society. But at the Green Party, we know they deserve more than simply applause.
The Green Party would commit to properly funding the NHS by increasing investment by at least £6bn each year, and supports the trade union campaign for a 15% pay increase for health care workers.
The Green Party’s plans include a further £1 billion a year in nursing higher education, allowing for nursing bursaries to be reinstated.
We would replace private sector involvement in the NHS with community-led services which can offer better care and value for money with funds spent on local priorities.

Free social care

We can’t address the crisis in the NHS without also tackling the crisis in social care.
Up to 1 in 3 hospital beds in England are occupied by patients fit for discharge but unable to leave due to a lack of social care provision.
Meanwhile, local councils are reporting increasing requests for social care help, with demand from working-age adults in particular increasing by 15 per cent since 2015/16.
Even the government’s own analysis shows that people’s homes are having to be sold after their deaths to pay care costs.
The Tory government say that charges should be capped at £86,000 - a cap they are finally planning to introduce in October this year. We say they should be capped at zero - social care should be free at the point of use.
The Green Party wants to ensure that social care is free at the point of use for all adults and put social care on a par with the NHS.
This would mean the end of a system in which many people have to pay for private social care, which has been estimated to cost £11 billion per year, while even those who receive publicly-funded social care end up paying a total of more than £3 billion towards their support.
There are a number of options to fund a new NHS-style service: a wealth tax on the richest 1%, a single unified income tax which could raise an additional £24 billion, or adding a social care levy to a more progressive tax system are just three examples.

Childcare for all

The Green Party has pledged to provide 35 hours a week of free childcare for all from the age of nine months to help families manage the overwhelming cost of providing early years care for children and allow parents greater flexibility to return to work.
This Green Party’s proposal goes much further than the Conservative government’s childcare announced in the March budget. It provides for more hours of free childcare (35 hours a week - over 30 in the Conservative plan) and would be available to far more parents (all children aged over 9 months - as opposed to children aged between 9 months and 3 years in the Conservative plan). It is also more inclusive, and does not feature the Conservatives’ restriction that both parents must work at least 16 hours a week to be entitled to the support.
Nurseries across the country have been left struggling with rising costs this year, forcing many to increase fees even higher and leaving many parents facing a decision about whether or not they can stay in work.
The Green Party is committed to properly funding nurseries and other childcare providers and ensuring that it is free for all from the age of nine months.
Care commitments disproportionately affect women. The Trades Union Congress has calculated that almost 1.5 million women are kept out of the labour market because of their caring responsibilities for family members, compared with 230,000 men, making them seven times as likely to stand outside the workforce; while a recent survey of more than 4,000 women by the British Chamber of Commerce found as many as 67% felt childcare duties in the past decade had cost them progress at work – including pay rises, promotions, or career development.
The Green Party’s proposal would give all parents greater freedom and flexibility by ending the impossible situation in which they can’t afford not to work, but childcare costs are so prohibitive that they also can’t afford to go to work and leave their children in nursery.

Mental health

The pandemic exposed the inadequacy of mental health services in the UK. We would focus our funding on major improvements to ensure mental health has equal importance alongside physical health.
Mental health therapy services would be able to be accessed by anyone who needs them within 28 days of a request, with more specific provisions made for particular difficulties experienced by those from BAME and LGBTIQA+ communities, children, adolescents and older people.
We must put an end to the postcode lottery around access to mental health services.

Maternity and women’s health

The Green Party would work to redress the gender skewed balance of funding in the healthcare system, making sure that spending on specific women’s health issues is given equal weighting to other services. Linked to this, we would take steps to dramatically reduce waiting times for specific women’s health services which have built up during the pandemic.
The Green Party would improve access to high quality care during pregnancy and ensure that all expectant parents are entitled to the care of a single midwife through prenatal care, birth and the first month of postnatal care. Baby clinics will be expanded, so that women can get access to health visitors and take their babies for regular check-ups at a location and time that is convenient for them.
The Green Party would focus funding to provide better reproductive health services making sure that all forms of birth control are free, to give women a real choice of what works best for their family.
We would develop and implement a UK-wide strategy to tackle gender-based violence, including domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), and trafficking. This would include investment in support services for refugees.
With the cost-of-living crisis making it harder for many survivors of domestic abuse to escape abusive relationships, it is crucial to ensure all survivors are able to access support services at all times so that finances are not a barrier to getting help.

Sexual health

Greens in government would invest heavily into a proper sexual health service, better healthcare for people living with HIV, and educational programmes in the education system and healthcare settings, and would fight to see an end to stigma around HIV/AIDs and sexually transmitted illnesses.
The Green Party backs plans to end HIV transmissions by 2030, committing to the recommendations of the HIV Commission to do so. That includes opt-out testing across every single NHS organisation to reduce the numbers of people diagnosed late with HIV. The latest HIV figures show 46 per cent of all people diagnosed with the virus were diagnosed late, with huge inequalities between different groups.
Local authorities where Greens are in power are working with the NHS to commit to the action needed. For instance, Brighton and Hove, where Greens run the council, is the first city in the country to adopt opt-out HIV testing as the norm.
Opt-out testing means people with the virus get diagnosed early, receive the treatment they need and cut the transmission rate. But the government is failing to provide the funds and leadership needed to roll this out across the NHS.