Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, speaking to ITV Tonight, defended his government's actions on social care, highlighting the £8.5 billion funding boost for social care and the NHS. "Over a million people work in social care," Sunak noted, underlining improvements in pay and the National Living Wage. He acknowledged ongoing challenges but insisted that "more money is going into the NHS and social care than ever before." Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00Boris Johnson said in July 2019, this is five years ago now,
00:04we will fix the crisis in social care. Is it fixed?
00:08So what we did immediately after I became Prime Minister was
00:11provide about eight and a half billion pounds of funding for social care and the NHS.
00:15The areas that we focused on were the workforce, who do an incredible job,
00:19over a million people work in social care, and what they've always said to me
00:23is that what they wanted was obviously decent pay and the national living wage
00:28has now been rising at quite a healthy rate over the last couple of years.
00:31And if you talk to anybody who works particularly in hospitals and in social care,
00:36they will say, if we can improve that, making it easier for people to leave hospitals
00:40and come back to their families or the community, not only is it better for them
00:45and their care and their recovery, it also helps us improve waiting times in hospitals.
00:51We've seen that for ourselves, actually, in the Tonight programme,
00:53and we would agree with you on that point. That is vital. But 2.6 million people in
00:57Britain are still waiting for care. There are 152,000 unfilled vacancies in the care sector.
01:02500 care homes closed last year.
01:04Across social care and the health service, it is going to take time to recover
01:09from the damage that the pandemic's had. And what I can tell you is right now,
01:13there's more money going into the NHS and social care than ever before.