


Last week, Angela Catley, Marianne Selby-Boothroyd and Mary Woodhall attended a meeting for the Social Care All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG). They share how it went…

The APPG is a group of Parliamentarians (members of Parliament) from across lots of political parties who are all focused on making social care better.
There is also a working group who advise them, made up of organisations who focus on this too. This includes Learning Disability England.

At this meet-up, we met with the Minister of State at the Department of Health and Social Care, Stephen Kinnock.

The Minister outlined the Government’s plans for a Big Conversation around social care, led by Baroness Casey.

He stressed the importance of cross-party consensus on social care and welcomed the APPG, with MPs from lots of different parties, involvement to help make this happen.

He talked about the cost pressures on care providers and how this will be discussed as part of the comprehensive spending review process, led by the Treasury concluding later in the Spring.

People in the room asked questions on everything from the challenges facing family carers to the challenges facing big provider organisations.

Lots of people talked about how people who use social care services will play a role in the Big Conversation. Mary asked about people with profound and multiple learning disability in particular. We also talked about older people supported by social care and how they will be involved.

The Minister said there will be a new email address for people to use to contribute to the Big Conversation and ask questions. This hasn’t been set up yet but will be soon.
Mathew from the APPG said that in the meantime anyone who had questions or issues they wanted to raise could send them to him by email.

It was busy session with a lot of people in a very small room, making conversation and discussion quite tricky.

Despite this, we were pleased to represent all the Learning Disability England voice groups and hope to be able to help members get involved in the review moving forward.