The coronavirus pandemic has brought the need for radical reform of the social care system into the limelight. A veteran analyst argues that, like health and education and other vital social needs, the care of the elderly should be financed out of general taxation

A minute’s silence to pay tribute to the key workers who have died in the fight against the coronavirus, the clapping session every Thursday – residential care staff, along with nurses, doctors and other essential workers, have come into the public eye in recent weeks. But where would the sector be if we had not learnt of the mounting number of coronavirus-related deaths of elderly residents in care homes? It was not until four weeks after the lockdown began that these deaths were added to the numbers of deaths in hospitals. Overlooking care home death rates, largely ignoring residential homes as sites of infection and making NHS staff the priority for testing and the provision of personal protective equipment has also highlighted the artificial and damaging gulf between our health and social care systems.

­For all its problems (not least multiple reorganisations over 30 years) and in spite of the impact of several years of spending cuts, the NHS retains a grip on the imagination and affection of the British people. Not so residential care, its very distant, little understood, impoverished and largely neglected cousin. Radically changed over the past 30 years – with few people noticing and even fewer caring – it has become the organisational mishmash that the health service was prior to the foundation of the NHS in 1948.