Political View: Health and social care – who pays?

It's the Trust which manages the Peterborough City hospital, as well as hospitals in Huntingdon and Stamford.

The Trust has several thousand members and any member of the public can apply to join. The members and the staff of the Trust elect the governors. The main role of governors is to elect the non-executive directors of the Trust and to scrutinise their work, as well as putting forward ideas and suggestions for improvement in the services that the hospitals provide.

It's a very open and democratic structure.

Having those making key decisions scrutinised by and accountable to a wider body of members is a really good way of running any organisation and I wish more companies, public bodies and charities would adopt such models.

At the recent General Election, Liberal Democrats were proud to put health and social care at the forefront of our campaign. And the public showed their support for this by electing a record number of Liberal Democrat MPs (72), who are now vigorously holding the new Labour Government to account on these issues.

The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has said "The NHS is broken" and his department frequently now repeats this in its press releases. The short term fix seems to involve buying more services from the private sector; but many patients are already jumping ship to the private sector anyway as NHS services such as dentistry and physiotherapy become almost impossible to find in many areas, including Peterborough.

But the bigger problem is adult social care. It's largely funded by councils, including those like Peterborough City Council, whose finances are being stretched to the limit.

We continue to see hospital beds taken up by people who could be better cared for in the community and we hear numerous cases of people being forced to sell their homes to fund social care.

Over a decade ago, the Dilnot report put forward a model for funding social care but its proposals have never been implemented and the new Labour government has just promised to set up yet another commission of inquiry which won't report until 2028.

To make matters worse, the new Government is increasing employer's national insurance contributions, which will put up costs for small social care providers.

The big elephant in the room is how better health and social care can be paid for. The honest answer is the money will have to come in some way from higher taxes, either on income or on wealth.

The Tories put forward the bizarre assertion that you can improve health and social care and cut taxes, which probably explains why they are now further from being in government than they have ever been. Increasing taxes on "big tech" or energy companies is one possible option but so is making very wealthy individuals and corporations pay more. .

In Yorkshire, where I originate from, there is a saying: "You can't get owt for nowt."

So the true answer is that we will all have to pay at least a bit more tax to get the first class health and social care services that everyone wants to see.