At the first major television event of the general election campaign, participants spoke more than 21,000 words over more than two hours, but people with disabilities were not mentioned once.
An analysis of the recording of the leadership debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, and subsequent interviews with Ed Davey, Stephen Flynn, Richard Tice and Adrian Ramsay, found that none of them, nor the two journalists who moderated the debate or interviewed the leaders, mentioned disabled people or disability.
The only exception to the neglect of disabled people in the two programmes broadcast on ITV on Tuesday night was the treatment of social services, which again only received superficial treatment and no direct mention of disabled people.
Social care was mentioned during the leadership debate after ITV’s Julie Etchingham questioned Mr Sunak and Mr Starmer.
Later, when interviewed by ITV’s Anushka Astana, Davie called for abolishing universal personal care charges and raising the minimum wage for care workers, as examples of policies from the Lib Dem manifesto (see separate article).
The neglect of disabled people in leadership debates and interviews came just two days after Kamran Malick, chief executive of Disability Rights UK, said he was “shocked and outraged” by the way disabled people had been ignored in the first 10 days of the election campaign, and that political parties “seem to be living in a parallel world”.
The section on social care during the leadership debate (pictured) lasted around one minute and five seconds and there was no cross-examination of Mr Sunak and Mr Starmer’s answers.
Mr Etchingham asked them: “Five years ago Boris Johnson stood where you are standing now and he told me he had an actionable plan for this.
“We are still waiting. Can you both commit to a fully funded solution in your manifesto this time?”
Mr Sunak insisted the Government had “already implemented rates reform”, but then added: “Pilots are underway to implement the reforms, which will be rolled out later this year.”
The government’s long-awaited reform, widely seen as regressive and unfair, would put a lifetime cap on social care payments in England at £86,000.
Two years ago, the government postponed the introduction from October 2023 to October 2025.
But in January this year, Sir Chris Wormold, permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care, told the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee that the Government could be forced into further delays if it believed under-pressure local authorities were unable to cope with a “large new chunk” of “complex work”.
It is not yet clear whether the Conservative manifesto will set a deadline for the reforms to be implemented in October 2025, with pilot projects due to run later this year.
Mr Sunak later said the Conservative government had pumped “an extra $8 billion” into social care because of “immediate pressures”.
This is likely a reference to the £7.5 billion in funding (PDF) provided for adult and children’s social care in 2023-24 and 2024-25, although only £2.7 billion of this is new funding from central government. Some of this money has been paid to the NHS, but it was announced in November 2022 when the government announced it would delay fees reform.
The remaining £500 million of the £8 billion appears to refer to new funding for social care announced by the government in January.
The Association of Adult Social Care Directors later said the extra funding was “wholly insufficient to meet the rising costs and increasing numbers of adults needing care and support this year” and that social care “needs a long-term, sustainable and fully funded plan”.
The National Audit Office said in November (PDF) that the government had “delayed fee reform, scaled back system reforms and fallen behind on some parts of the revised plan.”
Starmer, like his party in recent years, has focused on the need to improve conditions for care workers, rather than initiatives such as abolishing care charges or increasing funding for disabled people who need care and support.
He told the audience: “We will have a social welfare plan, as well as everything else in the manifesto, and that too will be fully funded and fully costed.”
He said the focus on care workers was because “one of the biggest problems in social care is a fragmented workforce” and “so many people are in bad situations.”
A 2022 investigation by disability campaigners found that tens of thousands of disabled people across the country face debt collection measures from local governments each year for unpaid care costs.
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