ST ALBANS and HARPENDEN PATIENTS’ GROUP.
(SAHPG).
Including London Colney, Redbourn, Sandridge. Wheathampstead.
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LATE SUMMER NEWSLETTER, SEPTEMBER 2026.
With this edition, we break new ground. There have been very few, if any, items of local NHS and social care news. However, there have been several important items of national news and we concentrate on three of them below.
Before reading on, please accept our apologies for not advertising an autumn Zoom Meeting. In the last couple of years, it has become more and more difficult to find NHS speakers. As soon as we have a meeting arranged, we will let you know.
ADULT SOCIAL CARE.
Mr Burnham, the new Prime Minister, has announced that he wants to reform and transform adult social care, with the cooperation and support of mainstream political parties. It is said that, on Sunday 26 July, he announced that he wanted to hold a meeting during the next day. Mrs Badenoch said that she was not available, Mr Davey that he was in France, and Mr Polanski that he had not been invited. Nor, apparently, had Mr Farage who soon accused Mr Burnham of a stitch-up and of contemplating a “death tax.”
Adult social care can be divided into two parts.
FIRST, involving people of working age. According to The Times (30.07.26) between 2024-25 and 2031 the number of people claiming incapacity benefit is forecast to rise from 3.4 million to 4 million and those on disability benefit from 6.5 to 8.8 million, costing billions of £’s. Mr Burnham is apparently prepared to make claiming benefits harder and said that the country had to “get really serious” about bringing down the bill.
SECOND, involving the care of the elderly and vulnerable, often in the closing stages of their lives. This aspect of adult social care was the main object of his announcement. It is a problem well-known to many of us: an elderly relative deteriorates, and does not qualify for free NHS clinical care, or for local authority funding for nursing or residential care. His or her assets, and often the family’s assets, have to be sold to pay for private care.
OVER the last thirty years, there have been 22 reviews of adult social care, usually concentrating on the second part, and each one has ended in failure. Will this one succeed? The new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Yvette Cooper MP, and Baroness Louise Casey, have been tasked with holding a “Big Conversation on Care”, and Baroness Casey to lead the 23rd review to an interim report later this year and to produce full recommendations during 2028. Perhaps Mr Burnham will still be Prime Minister and will manage to pass a Social Care Bill into law.
HOW might a National Social Care Service, providing free social care for the elderly, costing perhaps £18.5 billion a year, be paid for? (a) Replace inheritance tax (paid by about 4.5% of people) by a “national care levy” on all estates after a person dies. (b) A national insurance scheme in which working-age people make contributions and the “big pot” is ring-fenced for social care. (c) An extra 1.8% income tax for workers aged over 34 earning over £6,240, which would go into a national Later Life Care Fund. (d) From “existing budgets” and without raising taxes, but this would require cutbacks elsewhere, but from where? Defence, education, hospitals?
Would anyone like to be in Mr Burnham’s shoes? Kemi or Ed or Zac or Nigel? Or will they prefer to gainsay his offer of consensus and cooperation in favour of criticism?
HOSPICES.
Only in the last few weeks has a report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee on the “Financial Sustainability of Adult Hospices in England”, published in March 2026, received wide publicity on TV and Radio and in the newspapers.
Approximately 135 independent hospices and two national organisations. Marie Curie and Sue Ryder, provide palliative and end-of-life care to adults in England, some 270,000 people in 2024-2025. They supply much appreciated high-quality care, relive pressure on hospital beds and save the NHS money that can be spent caring for other patients.
Independent Clinical Commissioning Boards (ICBs) have a statutory duty to commission palliative and end of life care and in 2023-24 spent approximately £420 million doing so. However, that left a gap of about £1.2 billion, which the hospices had to find from other sources, including charity shops, donations and employing unpaid volunteers.
The Report found that the funding gap had two causes (1) Rising costs: inflation, high energy prices and rising staff wages (2) National changes and policies: higher employer national insurance contributions and increases in the National Minimum Wage.
It recommended re-structuring how ICBs commission hospice services and a change in the balance of financing and supervising of hospices between ICBs and the Department of Health and Social Care. In the meantime, there is a risk that independent hospices will make staff redundant and reduce their capacity, a disaster for many gravely ill people.
NHS DENTISTRY.
Just before Stephen Kinnock stepped moved from his position as a Minister of State at the Department of Health and Social Care in July 2026, he announced a complicated package of measures intended to tackle a slow-burning crisis in NHS dentistry. In cash terms, spending on NHS dentistry had fallen between 2010-2011 and 2024-2025. Taking inflation into account, spending had fallen by £500 million from 2021-2022 to 2024-2025.
During the last ten years, nearly 600 dental practices have ceased to provide NHS dental care. The British Dental Association attributes the fall to the compulsory closure of practices during Covid and to contact that dentists had with the NHS, many NHS dental treatments being loss-making. In 2026 an investigation by the BBC found that 6 in 10 adults had not seen an NHS dentist in the last two years. Of those who had attempted to get a new NHS appointment in the last two years, only 38% had been successful.
The reduction in access to NHS dental care had varied from region to region, being worst in the south west and the east of England. Figures for the area of Herts and West Essex ICB show that from March 2017 to March 2026, the number of dental practices offering NHS care fell from 184 to 171, a decline of -7.1%.
Whether this trend will be halted or even reversed remains to be seen.
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If you have any local NHS news, please send it to us. Please look out for notification of our next Zoom meeting. And, as ever, pass our Newsletter to anyone who may be interested.
Best wishes,
John Wigley (Chair SAPHG) 04.09.26.
John Wigley (Chair SAHPG) SEPTEMBER 2026
. johnwigley33@yahoo.co.uk