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Campaigning pensioners launched a petition calling for the cost of social care to be shared across society at a packed Islington Town Hall meeting on Tuesday.

Speaking as part of a panel in the council chamber, Dot Gibson, secretary of the Islington Pensioners’ Forum, said more funding was needed for a fairer social care system. To cover costs, she proposed a new 1 per cent tax on salaries to be matched by employers.

“The austerity cuts are creating the most enormous problems for providing [social] care. What happens is that older people ring 999 and end up in hospital, because they’re on the floor and can’t get up, the carers aren’t due, or maybe they don’t even have a carer,” she told the meeting, which was chaired by Tribune editor Eric Gordon.

“If you have savings and assets, your home for instance, of £23,250, you must pay completely for your care,” Ms Gibson added. “Therefore thousands of people lose their home. If you go into hospital it’s free at the point of delivery – that’s what it should be like for social care.”

The Local Government Association, which represents more than 370 councils in England and Wales, warned in February of a funding gap in social care of £2.6billion by 2020, and called for long-term solutions to the problem.

Ms Gibson said: “It’s about time we had our say, that we talked about this, and we started exchanging our ideas and experiences, and not just having it handed to us from on high.”
Heather Wakefield, national officer for the trade union Unison, said the social care crisis was due to long-term underfunding and privatisation, resulting in local councils running only 6 per cent of residential homes.

“We are the fifth-largest economy in the world and I believe we can afford decent care for all that need it,” she added.

Mr Gordon said that only a handful of Britain’s 1,500 weekly newspapers were independently owned like the Tribune, and that the media as a whole was failing to expose the scandal of the treatment meted out to the elderly.

Audience member Hilary Rose, 82, said she had experienced difficulties securing care through Islington Council for her husband. She added: “I spoke to four social workers and couldn’t get any care help, and I can’t hold my Steven up. My experience is, how do we get heard when things go wrong?”

Councillor Janet Burgess, Islington Council’s executive member for health and social care, said the yearly council tax increase is not enough to fund adult social care.

She added: “Our budget will have been cut by 70 per cent by the time we get to the end of this decade. It is difficult because the demographic of the country is changing. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of people aged 65 and older in the UK increased by 21 per cent, while the number of those 85 and older increased by 31 per cent.”

Cllr Burgess said the extra money for adult social care promised in the Conservative Party’s spring budget would mean £11million over three years – not enough to solve the crisis.

“We need an extra six million pounds each year just to stand still. Whatever the government is after June 8 it needs to address the funding issue properly,” she said.

The petition can be viewed at www.islingtonpensionersforum.co.uk