00:00Boris Johnson said in July 2019, this is five years ago now,
00:04we will fix the crisis in social care. Is it fixed?
00:08So what we did immediately after I became Prime Minister was
00:11provide about eight and a half billion pounds of funding for social care and the NHS.
00:15The areas that we focused on were the workforce, who do an incredible job,
00:19over a million people work in social care, and what they've always said to me
00:23is that what they wanted was obviously decent pay and the national living wage
00:28has now been rising at quite a healthy rate over the last couple of years.
00:31And if you talk to anybody who works particularly in hospitals and in social care,
00:36they will say, if we can improve that, making it easier for people to leave hospitals
00:40and come back to their families or the community, not only is it better for them
00:45and their care and their recovery, it also helps us improve waiting times in hospitals.
00:51We've seen that for ourselves, actually, in the Tonight programme,
00:53and we would agree with you on that point. That is vital. But 2.6 million people in
00:57Britain are still waiting for care. There are 152,000 unfilled vacancies in the care sector.
01:02500 care homes closed last year.
01:04Across social care and the health service, it is going to take time to recover
01:09from the damage that the pandemic's had. And what I can tell you is right now,
01:13there's more money going into the NHS and social care than ever before.
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