Care for thy neighbour pleas Lamb

Care minister Norman Lamb has called on councils to help rebuild neighbourly resilience’ in their areas so that older people can live independently at home. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the minister said encouraging friends and neighbours to help elderly residents would lower the number of people needing to enter residential care, reducing the burden on the state. He argued that the adult social care system would only cope with the pressures of an ageing population if individuals contributed to a partnership between state and society’. He said: We all have a part to play. In this way, we can make the system sustainable, and it can be a more decent society, a less neglectful society than we sometimes experience where we just expect the state to do everything,’ he said. The Liberal Democrat minister said the current system pushes’ people into residential care and does not do enough to ensure older people can retain their independence. Highlighting work done by Leeds city council, which has encouraged residents, including the elderly, to self-manage’ health conditions by giving them control of public money to spend on adapting their homes to help them live independently, the minister said that councils should lead the way in encouraging people to help their neighbours stay out of formal care settings.