Boris says young people need to think about social care costs

The prime minister has said the ‘younger generation’ need to start thinking about the eventual cost of funding their own social care.

Appearing in in Westminster, in front of a group of parliamentary committee chairs yesterday (13 January), Boris Johnson was grilled on promises he made when he first took office to reform social care.

‘I think the pandemic has highlighted the difficulties the social care sector is in,’ the prime minister admitted.

‘It clearly needs reform and it needs improvement, but there’s also the issue of people being forced to sell their homes to pay for their care and that’s something that we want to address and we’ll be bringing forward plans later this year.’

When pressed further on the matter by the chair of the health and social care committee, Jeremy Hunt, the prime minster replied social care should have a ‘long term plan’.

The prime minister also added that ‘the younger generation’ need to start thinking ‘about the eventual cost of that social care and we need to start having that conversation with the public’.

Mr Johnson was also quizzed by the former health secretary on whether the government intends to publish figures on how many people have been vaccinated by region or by local authority.

The prime minister said the government intends to start publishing regional breakdowns later this week.

‘I can tell you that some of the figures are very interesting,’ added Mr Johnson. ‘There are parts of the country where they’ve done incredibly well in, for instance, vaccinating the over 80s – more than 50% in the North East and Yorkshire.

‘It’s been less good in some other parts of the country. We want to be clear about all that.

‘The crucial thing is that we want the data about those who have been vaccinated to be shared and it will happen by the end of this week with public health directors in local authorities, because as we go forward, this vaccine programme is going to find that there are people that we need to reach that we can only reach with the NHS working hand in glove with local government.’

Photo Credit – TheDigitalArtist (Pixabay)