Rachel Reeves has one month to save health and social care from a £16bn jobs tax bombshell

6 March 2025, 00:01

Health and social care is on its knees. The Labour government was elected on its promises to break the endless cycle of decline of our health services created by the Conservative Party’s unforgivable neglect. Instead, Rachel Reeves' misguided jobs tax risks prolonging that misery.

The Chancellor’s jobs tax has the sector staring down the barrel of a nearly £16 billion tax rise by the end of the decade. A tax rise that GPs, care homes and dentists have all said they simply cannot afford.

Just last week, thousands of protesters gathered in Westminster to demand that the Government moves at speed to rescue social care. My Liberal Democrat colleagues and I proudly stood with them and heard their concerns. Time and again they said that the rise in national insurance risks many care homes and providers having to close their doors.

This is at a time where bed occupancy rates in hospitals are nearing total capacity at 96%. A safe bed occupancy rate is 85%, well below the figures that we have seen in recent weeks.

Shockingly, one in seven of these beds are taken up by people deemed medically fit to be discharged. A huge part of the reason for this is that there are simply not enough social care places for these people to be moved out of hospital, and into more suitable care settings.

This leads to the excruciatingly long waits that we see in our A&Es, with some people waiting days after it is decided they need to get a hospital bed until they are actually transferred to a ward.

These delays are not without consequence, they can be deadly. Recent analysis suggested that long waits in A&E could have contributed to around 50,000 deaths last year.

If more care homes close their doors because they cannot bear the additional costs of this jobs tax, less, not more, social care places will be available and more people risk being stuck in hospital when they don’t need or want to be there. All this will serve to put our A&Es under even greater pressure, when they are already at breaking point.

This does not even take into account the financial burden that GPs and dentists will come under as a result of this tax hike. These are services we all know are barely scraping by to get people the care they need on time, with people in pain having to suffer unnecessarily all too often.

Rachel Reeves has one month to protect these health services from a devastating jobs tax bombshell, one that will only cause more turmoil and misery in a sector that is already struggling to navigate immense challenges. At the Spring Statement, the Chancellor has a chance to save them from this. She must take it and exempt health and social care from her jobs tax.

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Helen Morgan is a Liberal Democrat MP and the party's spokesperson on Health and Social Care.

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