Is this hybrid model the way to pay for social care on the NHS?

Letters to the editor: our readers share their views. Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

Wes Streeting’s commission on care should address a fundamental fallacy with our “free-at-the-point-of-delivery” NHS (“Families shoulder ‘imbalance’ of care costs, says Wes Streeting”, Tuesday 7 January).

The payment cliff edge that occurs when discharging from free NHS care into paid-for care causes delays, whether into their own home with care visitors or into a care home. These bed-blocking delays ripple up the line, eventually causing delays at A&E and GP surgeries. No amount of fiddling with methods of paying for care will work until society removes this cliff edge, so that the costs to the individual or their family become similar, whether they remain in hospital or are discharged.

Society should look after seriously ill people and the elderly equally, but we cannot just raise taxes arbitrarily to achieve this halcyon objective.

I suggest that payment for care should be brought under the public tax umbrella, with private insurance for top-up medicine. Insurance schemes must be designed to ensure that our NHS can always pay properly for truly life-changing illnesses like MS and cancer. This would mean a hybrid system – a conclusion that most other countries came to decades ago.

Andrew Webb

Burwell, Cambridgeshire

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The impact of juggling care for different generations and family members is huge (“‘Sandwich carers’ suffer poorer mental and physical health, research suggests”, Tuesday 7 January). All too often, carers feel guilty and inadequate. You can’t accompany your mum to a GP appointment and collect an ill child from school at the same time. You can’t get a job and contribute to household income when you need to be constantly on hand to provide care and support.

Family arguments arise time and again, and you’re just left to get on with it.

Long-term and sustainable reform of social care, which gives unpaid family carers the support they desperately need, cannot come soon enough.

Frances Lawrence

CEO, Dementia Carers Count

Ganging up on Pakistani men

Robert Jenrick has, once again, pandered to the far right with his claim that Pakistani men are overrepresented in grooming gangs (“Badenoch urged to sack Jenrick for saying ‘immigrants with alien cultures have medieval attitudes to women’”, Wednesday 8 January). But his own party’s Home Office report in 2020 found that white men make up more than 80 per cent of sexual offenders.

As a Muslim living in Britain, I take pride in our history of fighting racism, upholding diversity and respecting all faiths and beliefs. It is disheartening to see Jenrick and his affiliates making attempts that might tarnish this beautiful image.

Islam as a religion championed women’s rights and freedom from its very inception. Jenrick’s comments about “medieval and backward attitudes” towards women are an unjustified attack on the faith and perpetuate false narratives.

Usama Mubarik

Chertsey, Surrey

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The religion of Islam is being blamed for the grotesque grooming gangs in Rotherham, Telford and Oldham (“Badenoch ‘wrong’ to claim Islamophobia definition bars talking about ‘groomers’”, Wednesday 8 January).

Islam forbids Muslims from even looking at unrelated members of the opposite sex, let alone touching them. This is why Muslim men do not shake hands with women – to avoid anything untoward happening.

The perpetrators of such heinous crimes use drugs and alcohol to entice their victims – anyone with a basic understanding of Islam knows that such intoxicants are strictly forbidden.

If Muslims committing such crimes means Islam advocates for it, then the same can be said for the church abuse scandal and Haredi Jews in New York. But you never see such a link being made, and rightly so. So why the double standard for Muslims?

Atif Rashid

Bentley, Hampshire

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Samantha Walker-Roberts is surely right to be frustrated with far-right groups for jumping on the bandwagon over grooming gangs (“‘We want justice’: Woman gang raped in Oldham aged 12 demands grooming inquiry but tells far right to stay out”, Wednesday 8 January).

But by pointing out that her own abusers were predominantly Bengali-heritage, as opposed to Pakistani, she may have indicated a slightly different commonality. Most Bengalis are Muslim.

Jack Straw and Sarah Champion have been criticised for their comments on the ethnic or religious origins of grooming gangs, and general data on child sexual abuse offences (as opposed to data on grooming gangs specifically) has been used to undermine them.

But solutions need an analysis of causes, however contentious.

Bill Bradbury

Bolton

Keep on playing those war games

With Israel having taken out so much of Iran’s air defences and long-range missile facilities, the United States, backed militarily by the rest of the free world, must now take out its nuclear weapons development capabilities (“Angry Trump roasts journalist when asked about Iran military strategy”, Wednesday 8 January).

Then, to counter China’s massive naval build-up, it should send fleet after fleet of naval ships through the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, and advise the Chinese Communist Party that at least a quarter of the free world’s long-range missiles are aimed at every dam along the Yangtze River.

The enemies of freedom don’t argue – they shout, and they shoot.

Howard Hutchins

Melbourne, Australia

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