Was Theresa May's "dementia tax" right all along? | James O’Brien - The Whole Show

It's three minutes after ten, a very good morning indeed to you

Do you want to play a game? Go on. Shall we play a Monday morning game

Let's see how long it lasts. But you remember I talked to you last week a bit about optimism

You have to be optimistic. It doesn't really, I mean, unless your scarf is tied so tightly around your neck

that you can barely speak, you have to be optimistic, whoever is taking over, because you want what's best for

if not what's best for your country, then you want what's best for yourself, really

So you have to be optimistic about a new prime minister. I remember being optimistic about Rishi Sunak for about three and a half hours

and then he reappointed Sue Ella Braverman. But a bit of optimism about Andy Burnham

So every Monday, I'm going to ask you to text me quickly

and we'll close it down at 10 past 10, so don't message me after 10 past 10

In about two hours' time, I'll get a few messages that won't make any sense at all

They'll just be random numbers appearing in my inbox because people are listening on catch-up and didn't realise

They forgot they were listening on catch-up. Some of the most, what would you call them

Strange. I was looking for a Latin word there, but I can't think of one. It was a bit like non-sequitur, but not quite

Some of the most odd, incongruous is a nice word, messages I get

I look at and I think, what on earth is? oh, they're listening to two hours ago

They're listening on catch-up. So, a mark out of ten. How optimistic are you currently feeling about Andy Burnham

I'm still at eight or nine. I'm not going to lie to you. I will, no doubt, rue the day that I dared to dream

Because it is, of course, not the despair that gets you. We can deal with the despair, but hope

It's the hope that gets you every time. So I'm going to go for eight, eight or nine, eight and a half

Eight and a half, eight and a half. Any advance on eight and a half? Eight and a half going once, going so

Just send me your number now. and what we'll do I should probably check this with Eleanor

before we came on air, can we do some science on this, can we keep all the numbers

we're just going to pretend, we're just going to lick our finger stick it in the air and then announce

that the numbers have gone up or down every every Monday, so we're at about 8.5 at the moment

I'm going to keep all your numbers oh you're a miserable old soul Edward

with a mere 5, honestly, there you go be more Elaine, Elaine's got a 9

so what are the what are the figures, what is the number

the optimism, what are we going to call it, the optimism index, the Andy Burnham, A-B-I-D

can we come, the Burnham Barometer, BB, that's good, well played, Keith, the Burnham Barometer

I want to get optimism in it, Bob, the Burnham Optimism Barometer, Bob, Bob, Monday morning

Bob, we're doing a Bob, we're having a Bob on a Monday morning, Bob, Bob, Bob, it's up and down, there you go, the Bob, it's the Bob, it's the Monday morning Bob, I'm going

to write that down, otherwise, as you know, I will forget it, it's the Burnham Optimism Barometer

And is there any way anyone could add them all up and then divide it by the number of people

Surely we can do that, Eleanor, can't we? If this was the BBC, we'd probably have graphs

If this was the bloody newsagents, they'd have a dedicated producer. If Emily Maitlis had come up with this idea

they'd be hiring someone now to be in charge of the Burnham Optimism Barometer. But on this show, on this..

this piddling little show, we'd never get anything. Poor old Keith. He'd have to do it in his lunch hour

if he wasn't so tuned in with his rights up the workers

So anyway, what is your optimism level? I'm not playing, says Colin

because I got Danny Dyer's age wrong by about 11 years. Yeah, a lot of us did, actually, Colin

And don't forget the birthday. We have birthday fun as well, but maybe not every day

So the Burnham Optimism Barometer is closing in two and a half minutes

And I'd like you to put the figure, which best describes, that best sums up your Bob

your Bob Index today, your Burnham Optimism Barometer. You can tell we're moving on to something tricky

because I've injected that first five minutes of the show with entirely inappropriate levity and fun

I mean this. It's a phrase that we come up with things, don't we

quite regularly together on the programme and then we forget about them almost immediately. But one thing that has stuck in my mind, and I hope in yours

is the idea of subjects that we all could confront, encounter, come up against

about which we know nothing until we know we need to know everything

Just think about that for a moment. I really think it does some heavy lifting, that phrase

You know nothing about it until you need to know everything. You're aware of it, of course you are, because it's talked about a lot

That's why I mentioned children's mental health, or mental health in general, actually, but particularly children's mental health from a parent's point of view

You've got a vague idea that there's something called CAMS out there. You presume that you can make a phone call and get some help

when you find yourself in incredibly dark times. There must be somewhere you can turn to, and then guess what

There isn't, or at least it's incredibly hard to access. You suddenly need to know everything

You know, under the same umbrella, you'd put eating disorders and things like that, things about which you know nothing until you suddenly need to know everything

I'll tell you what, the Bob quotient is high. The Bob quotient is high today

I wonder how long that's going to last. Try to remind me, because we'll forget, every Monday I'll take the temperature of the nation

by inviting you to contribute to the Burnham Optimism Barometer, and the Bob figure, every Monday we'll track it

and we'll see where we're going. It could go down, it could go up again, but we shall see. Things about which you know nothing

until you need to know everything. You almost hesitate to... or I'm almost hesitating to describe my own situation on this

So I've got an elderly mum, and then I've got a mother-in-law, and my wife's stepfather, very, very, very much part of the family

And all three of them currently live in their own homes. And you wonder what might be on the horizon

You wonder what might be in place. Should they no longer be able to look after themselves

you don't want to jinx anything by saying i i can't quite imagine that happening

anytime soon but you don't know do you and then suddenly when you find yourself in that moment

you need to know everything about a subject that you maybe thought you had a passing understanding

of because goodness knows that bloke on lbc whether it's me or nick or obviously sheila's

not a bloke but you've heard it on your favorite radio station several times you've been a party to

the conversations, you maybe tune it out a little bit, because it's not immediately relevant to you

but, um, hey, just, yeah, I mean, what, what, what, what, if you go into a home, I think you might have

to sell your house at some point, yeah, it's all okay, and then boom, mum can't look after herself

anymore, grandad needs to go into a home, that dread phrase, what's going to happen, how are you

going to pay for it, how much is it going to cost, I am going to make some admissions to you, I'm

going to make some confessions to you. I still don't really understand a lot of it. I can't

remember, for example, why Theresa May's proposals blew up in her face so damagingly. I really

can't remember why. I think that there was something about a threshold, which is currently

So if you got assets worth in excess of I think you will be required to sell them You will be compelled to sell them i forced

You will have to sell them to pay for your social care, to pay for your fees, if you go into a home

And Theresa May was going to raise it to £100,000 and she was going to break..

You see, I mean, I do this for a living, but I don't need to know everything about it

So at the moment, I'm pretty close to knowing nothing. and forewarned is, of course, forearmed

I think if I felt a little bit closer to the possibility

I hope I would now be paying more attention. I hope I would now be digging into things more

Did you know that Keir Starmer had a go at addressing this

I've got the figure, I don't know why, I've got the figure of £83,000 in my head

So I've got £100,000 next to Theresa May's face, and I've got £83,000 next to Keir Starmer's

When Andy Burnham was health secretary in 2009, he did actually propose a universal system of social care

and he did pursue the idea of a compulsory levy to fund it

Of course, the government didn't really survive for long enough for it to be more examined

but there was an idea of deferring the payment until after people had died

which of course led the Tories to brand it a death tax. I presume that some people are paying millions of pounds

hundreds of thousands of pounds for social care. You sell the house and every penny ends up going on the social care costs

while as other people are paying nothing because they don't need it

Imagine if the rest of the NHS worked like that. Imagine if, God forbid, you got cancer and your neighbour didn't

and you had to sell your house to treat your cancer. you had to find the money

to pay your medical bills social care not technically a medical bill

but it might as well be we can agree on that I think it's probably a historical disaster

that the two have been separated but imagine if it was everything else

imagine if you broke your leg you know how fascinated I am by the notion we talked

why did we talk about it last week the amount of money oh because of the research into poverty

and this bizarre sort of brain gristle that some people have that prevents them from understanding that you can actually run out of money

Working, functioning adults and non-working, functioning adults can run out of money

They can run out of money before they run out of money. And I'm always interested, happily these days

in a largely academic sense, by what would be enough to really, really knock you off the rails

to really knock you off your feet. I don't know why I often reach for a broken boiler, because come the winter, you really need a boiler

you really need heating in your house, but you also need to find a few grand in order to get a new one

and you have not got a few grand. You've got nowhere to go for it

Imagine if that was medicine. You know, it's medieval, right? Well, it's not. It's probably just the 19th century

You've got to find the money to pay the sore bones, as doctors used to be called

You break your leg, what are you going to do? You've got to find the money to get it set, otherwise you're going to be damaged for life

Any other area of care, health care, any other area of health care

listen, I appreciate you can pay money to get better treatment or a shorter weight

but you can't, you can never be so poor that you're not going to get any treatment at all

And so it is with social care, if you're really poor, the state will pay for it

But if you've got 23,500 pounds in assets, you're paying for it yourself

So one of the reasons why it's controversial, it's quite hard to get your head around this stuff

Because why is it so controversial? Because one of the reasons is that if they were to introduce, well, at the moment, it's almost as if you get penalized for having money

And that, of course, is anathema to anybody even remotely right-wing. You know, this is outrageous

You hear it a lot during the private education debates, don't you? I've worked bloody hard to send my child to private school

Why on earth should I have to pay VAT on my school fees? Which, of course, implicitly suggests that 90% of the country

who are never going to have enough cash to send their children to private school are somehow not working as hard as Chummo Online 2

which is a ludicrous suggestion, but one that you have to sustain to if you want to cling to the notion that you were born 3-0 up

but somehow scored a hat-trick in life. So, you know, if you get to the end of your life

and you haven't got enough assets to qualify for a compulsory purchase of your home

you could have been working as a police officer or a nurse, you could have been in the army

you could have been down a mine back in the day. The idea that it means that you have not worked as hard

as the people who've got assets is ridiculous. Similarly, you could have been really careful

with very little income and you end up with very little to show for it at the end of your life

So the person over there say, well, I've been really careful. I've gone without. There will always be some people who are, if you like, swinging the lead

or the exceptions that prove the rule. You've lived a life of fecklessness and debauchery

and you get to the end of your days and you can't look after yourself

You haven't got a pot to pee in and therefore the state will step in and look after you. And that's not fair because he was going out all the time when we were kids

and he had a nice car and he crashed it. Do you see what I mean

These, what you might call anecdotal anomalies, are always going to plague social policy

But I think we should probably pay a little bit less attention to

than some of the media commentators and right-wing politicians tell us to

So you've got money and you have to pay. You have to give it to

the carers. You have to give it to the businesses, the people, the individuals, the companies, the homes that are looking after your elderly

So, there's a little bit of... well, there's quite a lot of politics there, but there's also quite a lot of confusion

I don't necessarily want to have a heated debate today. I just want to know what happened to you

That's all. I just... because the problem with subjects about which you know nothing

until you need to know everything is that the people who know everything have forgotten what it's like to know nothing

So you're up to your ears in this. You can't believe that mum's house is..

that the money in the bank from the sale of mum's house is just going down every month by £10,000, £2,000, whatever it is

You can't quite believe that there are people who know nothing about... But you used to be someone who knew nothing about this

and now you're someone who knows everything. And that journey somehow robs you of the memory

of what it was like to know nothing. Some people won't have a clue

until it's pretty much the moment to go looking for a care home for mum

They won't have a clue about the fact that they're going to have to sell mum's house

They have a vague knowledge in the back of their mind. But they're going to have to sell mum's house

Now, I think, and again, I make no apologies on this occasion

for being entirely in your hands when it comes to knowledge and information

because nobody's perfect. I can't have a proper grasp and a deep understanding

of every single subject that we talk about in some ways it good because it hopefully will encourage you to share your insights So the dementia tax was what did for Theresa May

Social care funding essentially saw a massive lead in the opinion polls dissipate after she called an early general election

to the point where she had to give a million pounds to the DUP to keep a functioning majority in the House of Commons

Starmer flirted with it, I think, and backed down as Starmer was wont to do

and Andy Burnham's gone all in. Early doors. First big interview. NHS will collapse without social

care reform. Nobody's got a clue what the social care reform would look like, but let's talk about what is

in need of reform. What happens? That's it. And I know you're thinking, well, hang on

James must know what. I don't. I don't know. And even if I did know, there'll be

hundreds of thousands of people listening to this programme who haven't got a clue. What happens

What actually happens? Make my eyes water. Make me wince. Tell me that you have spent on..

Because some people have spent nothing, and that's why it's such a political hot potato

Why on earth should I pay anything when I am not going to need any of the benefits

or any of the care that is being paid for by that tax or by that levy

Answer, same reason you pay for the NHS. Some people might go through their entire lives

without having recourse to the NHS, without ever popping up in A&E

are barely going to your doctors except to get your jabs before you go on holiday. Some people might live lives of untrammeled healthiness

but they still pay the same amount for the NHS as people who are in and out like a butcher's elbow

I want you to tell me what happens. What actually happens? Shock me? Amaze me? Delight me? Amuse me

What actually happens when social care suddenly becomes the thing about which you knew nothing

and today you need to know everything? What did you discover? what do you wish is the key question

It was a billion quits you gave the DUP, not a million, my apologies. There you go, what's a zero between friends

What do you wish you'd known? That's all. What do you wish you'd known

about an ordinary person's relationship with the social care system in this country

And if you want to then have a crack at how it might be successfully reformed, feel free

But before we can do that, what do you wish you had known

and what is likely to make the rest of us wince. 0345 6060 973

It's 10.21. James O'Brien on LBC. Two minutes after 10. So I told you I'd get confused

Some people are still sending in their bobs. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to rewind live radio and listen to the top of the show

when we introduced an exciting new feature. And of course, some people are sending in three zeros

in response to me suggesting that a billion pounds was one zero more than it's a figure of speech come on give me a break so three zeros is not

your score on the bob the uh burnham optimism barometer three zeros is you correcting my

mathematics um there'll be quite a lot of mathematics i suspect in the actual conversation

that we're having and before that kicks off with jane in stockport followed by lisa in liverpool

i have to tell you that bill oddy has passed away um former goodie latterly of course an

incredibly popular and effective wildlife presenter it's been announced in the last

few minutes that bill oddy has died at the age of 85 his agent has just confirmed and every time

somebody in the public eye passes away on the program i'm struck struck by the fact that so

much well your emotional response will depend entirely upon your your relationship with their

work i mean unless you're in the very rare position of knowing any of these people personally

so if you're my age the goodies was kind of the first grown-up comedy program

that made you laugh it was so ridiculous and childish but it was on at grown-up time

it was your parents were watching the goodies and graham gordon and timbrook taylor i think

came from very much a footlights background i could be wrong i know that graham gordon was a was a doctor

and bill oddy was was not from that background at all it was an extraordinary combination of talents

i don't know who was responsible for putting them together but the goodies goodie goodie gumdrops

was just anarchic, incredible television. But you need to be roughly my age or older

to have appreciated it, of course. Anybody younger may love him from his wildlife work

or his work may not have touched you much. But sometimes they get me. They get you, goody, goody, yum, yum

They get... That's really sad. That's got me. The other thing you do, I don't know if you do this

always think of my dad. My dad was 73 when he passed away. And if it's someone that I like

I kind of find myself going, oh, I'm glad you had a good innings. If it's someone I didn't like that much

I find myself going, well, that's not fair. How come they got to live longer than Dad

So with Bill Oddie, I'm glad he had a good inning. It's 10.24, let's get to social care, actually, speaking of age

Jane's in Stockport. Jane, what made you pick up the phone? I think what made me pick up the phone

is people's just general ignorance about the social care situation. I think they just assume that it's going to be like the NHS

and you're going to be looked after. And I think, you know, our family's story is in no way extraordinary

You know, I describe myself as being pretty typically middle class. My mother was a math teacher

My father was an engineer. They had three children and their youngest

And mum had three very typical conditions. She had a stroke. She fell and broke her hip

And she had dementia. Right. and she ended up in a care home for eight years

She died this March and at the time of her death, we were paying £6,000 a month for her care home

Not an atypical amount of money, so, you know, over £70,000 a year

So, you know, over the last eight years of her life, you know, we would have paid £600,000

something like that, in terms of care. and when you say we

oh it when I say we that's very selfish isn't it it was her money absolutely it was her money

no I didn't mean it like that I feel like that just because I think

better than me I don't know how you managed to say in two minutes what took me 20 at the top of the show

but it's exactly that isn't it you think that it's just like because if of course you'd got a more physical

a more obviously physical illness if the dementia is the kicker here

because the treatment for stroke will be the NHS, but the aftercare

and the social care, that doesn't kick in in the way that NHS care does

We just sort of blithely presume that it does. So, do you get told

that she has to sell her house? How does that bit work

What happens is, I mean, she had savings, she had a pension, and

it just gradually filters through to you that when all her money has gone

that you're going to have to sell her house now we took the decision to sell her house because it was empty for a couple of years

she went basically she had a stroke yes she lived at home successfully for many years but then she

fell and broke her hip she could never mobilize again and by that stage she already had dementia

as well which was an added complication which meant she had to end up in a care home and of

course if you've got over 23 000 it's down to you not only to find it and the help in terms of

finding a suitable care home was practically non tell me more what do you mean you You were literally I mean I nearly said getting out the yellow pages Jane but I don think those days are behind us aren they But it the internet

That is almost it, James. So, I mean, the hilarious thing is Age UK were given the contract in Stockport

for helping, the social care contract in Stockport for helping families find care

So these are people, let's be clear here, these are people that are bed blocking. My mother was bed blocking at this point

and, you know, she's a lady in her late 80s with dementia

and what happens is, instead of phoning me, her next of kin

they don't visit her at her bedside. Three days later, I'm, you know, tidying up at her table

and I'm following this pack of paper and I watch this, I read it and it's from Age UK and it's a list of care homes

with availability that might be suitable for my mum. But I knew nothing about this

and she was not fully compost mentis at the time herself so wouldn't have no oh my days

yeah so she'd forgotten you have a conversation with her 10 minutes later she won't remember

you've had the conversation and this this is this is the farce of the whole situation there's

very little communication it really is down to you um you know i'm quite a sort of go-getter i

get out there and get stuff done so um yeah i was able to pick it up and run with it and go and visit

care homes. But there'll be lots of people, some people might not have daughters or sons

they might not have anybody looking after them, they might be on their own. I mean it's

beyond the lottery this, I don't know if there's a word big enough to describe how utterly

kind of inconsistent the scenario is. And if you hadn't had, if your mum hadn't had

savings and a pension and indeed a home that could be sold, what would have happened to

her would she would she have gone to a different home with i mean i think the same then social

services would have stepped in because then the responsibility yes you would end up with a social

worker and they would have found somewhere um i have to say i mean what the only the only silver

lining in all of this for me is you if you have money you then get a choice don't you yeah always

choose a care home and i remember one time mum um slipped out of bed and brought her wrist while

actually from the care home. And, I mean, not the care home's fault. The care home was superb

They were an excellent care home. But anyway, we had to go to hospital and all the rest of it

And we had hospital transport back to the home because, you know, the hospital kind of terrains that

And so we did a sort of round robin of various different care homes, dropping people off

And none was last on the list. And, of course, all the professionals

the ambulance drivers, the team there, they know all these homes just as the district nurses do

And we stopped at the second to last one and it looked bleak. It looked really bleak

And when the carer got back in, the ambulance driver, I said, oh, I said, that place doesn't look very good

And he just looked at me and went, yeah, you're not a good one

And that one is terrible. And I thought, well, at least we have the choice

You know, some people don't have any choice at all. And that is, you know, why I don't know what you feel about it

but the idea that everybody should be paying, even though it was only going to be accessed by some people

would raise all the boats in the harbour, wouldn't it? You wouldn't..

It would. Can I also be clear, James? I think people... You're very late for the news, Jane

I don't know if you've ever done this before, but it's horribly unprofessional. Carry on. I'm sorry

I... You know, there have been all these commissions and studies and stuff

and they all seem to say the same thing, which is there should be a cap on the cost

Yes. Which I think is right. But I'm very clear. I'm not expecting for someone to pay to keep a roof over my head

and something for me to eat. So I think absolutely people should be asked to pay

for the bed and board element of their care. But not the care element

And so then it becomes like private health. So, you know, if you want to have, I don't know

I've got to show my age a bit, if you want to have Sky TV and prawn sandwiches, you can pay extra for a private room in hospital

even though, you know, the level of medical care that you're going to get isn't going to be vastly different

So there is, yeah, why do, I mean, okay, very bad question this, really, from me

because I should have answers and opinions on this subject. Why is it such a hot potato

Is it just because people object to the idea of paying for something they won't themselves necessarily need

I think it's partly that, but also I think it's general ignorance, and I don't mean that in a cruel way

It's just that people are unaware of it until it hits them. And then, of course, it's a lottery

you know you might have somebody that perhaps needs help for maybe only a few months at the

end of their life you know i think one was particularly lucky in her situation um in in

needing such long-term care it's it's the people that have to um have that degree of care and help

for an extended period at the end of their life where it is yeah so you you you you see six hundred

thousand pounds move across the counter as it were and and other people will see a fraction of

that, or less, some people will see more, and yet everyone is on their own

really, and they're bobbing around in the sea, in their own little boat, there's very, very little

sense of cohesion or community, or, given that it's called social care, society

I mean, listen, Jane's provided a brilliant introduction to the subject, so we can

probably add to the list now, the question of what on earth would reform look like? Do we even know

what solutions would look like, beyond a cap? Because at the moment, there is no limit

You know, you can have £10 million in the bank, You need social care for 30 years for whatever reason

Everybody lives longer these days. It's all gone. And then somebody over the road who reaches the buffers with Tupper's Hapenny in the bank

they pay nothing. They get less care, less pleasant care, less fragrant and salubrious care

but they pay nothing for it. I don't know. I mean, I really don't know

I can't think of another subject where I feel so intellectually incapable

for that reason that we highlight. You know nothing about this until you need to know everything

Dominic Ellis has your headlines. James O'Brien on LBC. It is 10.36 and it shows what I know

A little bit of inverse snobbery, I think, perhaps, when I suggested that Bill Oddie hadn't been in the footlights at Cambridge

with Graham Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor. Indeed, he was. I also didn't know, and if you're just joining us

Bill Oddie has passed away, it's been announced this morning, he grew up in my neck of the woods

I just didn't know that. hail zoean um just up the road from where i grew up and then he went to king edward school in in

birmingham um i i suppose because he wasn't a very obviously sort of public school type i thought he

hadn't gone to cambridge and joined the footlights and ended up being put together with graham garden

and tim book taylor by a sort of clever washington comedy producer it was not the case there's quite

crossover you know between uh the goodies and that that group of comedians and uh monty python

there's a lot of the same with the um with the david frost stuff that there was quite a lot of

crossover people working out who got on with who and what the chemistry was and which shows would

work and which combinations would work and a little bit of alchemy involved there which

reminds me that eric idol is coming on full disclosure soon i stay tuned to find out more

10.37 is the time. Back to social care. Stay with this. We may stay with this for more than an hour

It just feels mad. I genuinely... I mean, it feels almost insurmountably..

complicated. For example, I could not tell you, and remember what I do for a living

I couldn't tell you why it is so politically contentious. It did for Theresa May at the polls

They called an early election, streets ahead in the opinion polls, they announced something that

became known as the dementia tax, and she almost lost to Jeremy Corbyn. Or at least she saw her

majority massively reduced, making her incredibly vulnerable to Boris Johnson's vanity and ambition

I could not tell you. Because I'm guilty of not knowing anything about it

until I suddenly need to know everything, and I don't suddenly need to know everything. But politically, apart from the sheer complexity and scale of the problem

I couldn't tell you why it was such a political hot potato. Is it one of those things where every solution will be unpopular

And I don't know if we ever lived in an era, or indeed in a country

where governments could be paternalistic and say, short-term pain, long-term gain. No one's going to like this in the short term, but you're going to have to trust Nanny

You're going to have to trust Matron. Everything will get better in the long term. We can't really do things like that anymore

I suppose Margaret Thatcher tried to, in her own mind, with the poll tax, and that did for her

I don't know. I'm thinking out loud. Which is just as well, really, because for a radio presenter to think in silence

would be a very, very odd departure from the norm. Deborah's in Sidcup. Deborah, what would you like to say

Hi, James. I spoke to you before, but still a bit nervous, but this is a subject really close to my heart

My mum had dementia and was in a care home and she sold her home

and the money ran out What happened when it ran out? Well, they wanted to move her

to another care home We looked at the other care home Forgive me for interrupting, but remember I know nothing

and you know everything So the council is inside So we looked at care homes that were

nowhere near Oh, how traumatic for you all How horrible for you all

Well, we're now... My mum passed in April. I'm sorry. We did cause a fuss

Yes. For the remaining few months, she was allowed to stay where she was

I'm now in exactly the same position, excuse me... That's all right. ...with my husband

Oh, I'm sorry. He's in a care home with advanced dementia. Okay

We sold our house, and I went somewhere much smaller, moved away

Did you have to do that? Were you required to do that, even if you were still in the house? Forgive my ignorance

James, if he was to have the care, we were deemed to pay. I didn't really have a choice because if we had to pay

there wasn't enough money outside of the house to pay for where we wanted him to go, where he'd been to respite

and where he'd been well cared for in respite. So you wanted him somewhere that you felt happier

Yes, and he paid for the house the same as I had. He was entitled to that money

He was entitled to that money. We are now at the point where, as a family, we are wrecked with worry

because we're reaching the same position again. in a year the money is going to run out

and I'm taking a sleeping tablet every night because if I wake up at three

all I do for the remaining hours is turn over in my head

how long the money will last what we will do when it doesn't last

and it's horrific it's horrific if you're dealing with a young one

a loved one who is in this position it's awful I go in there and he doesn't know who I am sometimes

he's very distressed I'm sorry. And then you have on top of it the financial worry

Which is huge. It's awful. I cannot tell you how dreadful it is

And something needs to be done because I'm not in good health with worry

I have counselling. It's all just the same. It's wrecked. It's wrecked our family

It's wrecking our family. Twice it's wrecked our family. I suppose politically, and doesn't that feel like an inadequate word when we're talking about your life in this way, but politically and historically, so few people have found themselves in precisely your position that it hasn't garnered the political salience

It hasn't become a big political issue in the way that it would do if, for example, you know, huge numbers of families were in the same position that you're in because it's so obviously unjust and unfair and unsustainable

It is. And also, we don't begrudge the money. I don't begrudge the money. I'm not asking not to pay. All I'm asking is that when we've paid all we have, he's allowed to stay where he is

Oh, Deborah. Can I ask a couple of questions? Are you going to be all right or should we

No, I'm used to this. I know you are. I know you are

So what do we know about where he, or your mum, if you're more comfortable talking about your mum

what do we know about where they would go to save some money

when you're no longer picking up the bills yourself? The places we looked at with mum

because obviously I haven't had to look at places in my husband yet, but places we looked at for mum, as the previous lady said

were so different. And I'm not talking about bells and whistles, I'm not

We went to one and we spoke to a lady about safeguarding. Yes. And she said, oh, yes, we always keep the front door shut

Right. Well, another one we went to and there was an elderly lady, quite frail

walking down a staircase, a staff staircase on her own, and they said, well, we don't know how she got in there

Oh, Lord. And this is when supposedly they'd be on their best behaviour because they've got potential clients coming around

You would have thought so, yes. And I'm not blaming these homes at all, James

I'm not blaming them and I'm not blaming the staff because the people in there are doing the best they can

under really, really difficult circumstances. But it's like a nightmare you just can't get out of

And you want your loved ones to be in the best possible space

and we can't. The place actually becomes their home. I mean, obviously, we'd rather he came home here

He can't. He has advanced dementia. He has Parkinson's. he's doubly incontinent, he's immobile

he cannot be here, we cannot care for him. So he's in a place where he's well-careful

but he also thinks of it as his home. And it's like being evicted

It's like evicting a sick old person, thankfully, at the end. And maybe I'm being naive when I say

if that was happening all the time to lots and lots of people

it would have a sense of urgency to it that seems to me to be lacking

But maybe I'm just wrong, maybe we're just not looking at it because it's so complicated

Do you understand why it's such a contentious political issue? Is it because they'd have to find the money

to pay for your husband's care from somewhere? I know. I know they do

And it would come, just to think out loud, forgive me, you know what I'm like when I've got a bee in my bonnet

So the argument would be that some of the people in the less pleasant places will have paid taxes all their lives

albeit that they've ended up with no savings or assets. And those taxes would then be used to help keep your husband

in a place that's nicer than where they are. Well, yes, I suppose so

But as I say, we've paid our taxes. I know, I know. I'm just thinking out loud, Deborah

And we're willing to pay everything else we have, everything we can liquidate

But you worry you might still run out? Oh, definitely I worry about it

I worry about it every single day. There's not a minute of the day when that bit of that hamster wheel

is not going round in my head. Oh, dear. Yeah and there no way you can I mean you mentioned counselling but in terms of actual substantive improvements things that would take these worries away I hesitate to say All that basically does is keep me from going under It keeps me treading water because it can solve the problem

That's what I mean. But I dread to think where I'd be without that. I would drown without that

Yeah, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. And I know it's scant consolation just to point out that you've got each other and your daughter is obviously suffering like you are

but like all parents, you don't want your children to be suffering any more than you want your husband to be in a vulnerable position

No. And I wish I'd had a time machine because you just don't..

I mean, back years ago, I didn't assume my mum would get dementia

and I certainly didn't assume my husband. But if I could go back and there was a dementia attack

by Lord, I'd pay into it just to save myself this grief at the end. Do we know why it's so

When Theresa May suggested that we all do that, do we know why it was so politically...

I think because people think it won't happen to me, or it's so far down the line

So it's Kemi Baden-Ott already saying, well, I won't support her if it involves a tax rise

So where on earth is this money going to come from? To be frank, Kemi Baden-Ott won't have to worry

because the chances are the money won't run out for her or her loved ones. I don't know

But, yeah, I mean, I guess that is one of the reasons why certain people and certain political persuasions don't..

But just in general, people say it won't, you know, it either won't happen or it's so far..

Believe me, though, if that train is coming for you, It comes down the track so fast

And that's clear. And you've done an incredible job of communicating that

I'm just looking at some numbers while you're talking. And so it's about 9% of the population have dementia

That's obviously a gradient, isn't it? So it is going to be relatively small numbers of people

that potentially find themselves in the situation that you find yourself in. But that's not..

I'm glad because I wouldn't wish this on my worst ending. You're a lovely person, Deborah. It's really shining out of the radio

You're going to set me off in a minute because you really don't deserve any of this. I don't think that's possible

I'm not as tough as I sound sometimes, but you really don't deserve any of this

and I'm so sorry that you're going through it. But you are living proof of what I said about knowing nothing about it

until you suddenly need to know everything. Yeah. And you'd rather not know all this stuff

I mean, that's obvious, because you've had to live it. I hope, I hope, I hope, you know, that something comes up

that I sound like Mr. McCorber. That will be part of it. one in three people born today

will develop it in their lifetime because we are living so much longer

But it's about one in 11 people over the age of 65 who have it now

So that's about 11% in the state. So around the 10% mark

If it was 25-30, it'd be a much bigger issue than it is now

And how on earth, if we bring the politics into it now

how on earth are we going to find the money to look after people like Deborah's husband

if we don't actually increase the amount of money that we take off everybody in expectation

like a kind of collective life insurance or dementia insurance? It's a funny old world, isn't it

How would it have worked for Theresa May if they'd managed to get it described as dementia insurance

in the tabloid press rather than dementia tax? I don't know. And obviously she was a Tory, so God knows what would happen if a Labour politician came up with something similar

But it's dementia insurance. There's a one in ten chance that you will get dementia

So every month you will pay X pounds to look after everybody who gets dementia later in life

on top of the taxes that go to the NHS. And so you just call it dementia

I mean, that's far too simple and straightforward, isn't it? And I know that Kemi Baden-Roch's already ruled out any increases in taxes

but, you know, she's not in charge. she can jog on. And I didn't want to say this in front of Deb

because I know this is the thing that keeps her awake at night. There's not going to be anything left if she ever

finds herself in need of the sort of care that her husband is currently receiving

Could be you. It's 10.49. James O'Brien on LBC. Told you. I told you this is something of a Pandora's box

You take the lid off and you can't control what is inside, what comes out

I mean, here's another stupid question for you. Do we know why it's so expensive? There was an awful lot of concern at one point

about the way that private equity has moved into social care, children's homes in particular

I've had some terrible personal experiences with this, involving kids I'm very, very close to who need full-time care

And one of their homes shut down pretty much without any warning whatsoever

And Private Eye did a report on it, and it turned out that the private equity owners of the space were behaving in ways that you would expect private equity companies to behave, but not children's homes to behave

Do we know why it's so expensive? Why it's £6,000 a month

And where, forgive me, but I want to know where the savings are made

So if you go from, I mean, staffing levels would be the most obvious thing, but presumably there's a legal minimum

It was Deborah's story, wasn't it, of the lady on the stairs and the staff saying, we've got no idea how she got there

So the most obvious thing you'd say is that you are at more risk if there are not more staff

But the other stuff will be decor, will it? I remember going to see my wife's grandfather when we were still courting and the home that he was in

and just, I mean, it wasn't unpleasant, but it certainly wasn't luxurious

And, you know, there will be things like how quickly spillages are cleaned up and staffing levels are going to affect everything

Do we know why it is so expensive? Prisoners work out about five grand a month

It's almost more than Eton. Eton College. Maybe that's a stupid question

Maybe that's a stupid question. Lisa's in Liverpool. Lisa, what made you pick up the phone? Oh, good morning, James

Thanks for listening. Essentially, my dad is riddled with Parkinson's. My mum died of metastases

and it might sound a little odd, but she was actually his primary carer

So obviously she died, and we were thrown into tremendous grief, but also faced with this big issue around dad

because his Parkinson's was already advanced. Right. Anyway, there was nothing, absolutely nothing in the way of support or guidance with regards to how to navigate the situation

We literally just had to almost make it up as we went along. To begin with, we got four carers a day, four carers a day into Dad

That's the maximum you can actually have. So he's always got someone with him, has he

Or do they come in and out of the house? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, if only

I told you I was ignorant. sorry sorry four carers a day

and I don't know 15-20 minutes a time right so four visits

yeah and that was costing over £500 a week his money I should say that wasn't funded by us

he was funding it but that was over £500 a week anyway he was deteriorating he was clearly deteriorating we set his bungalow up with all the mod cons if you like the panic alarms the rails

We got occupational health in to essentially advise if there's anything else we can do in this setting

and no was the answer. So that was as safe as it was going to get for him

Anyway, in November, he fell in the middle of the night. my brother lives just five minutes walk away from him i should say but he fell in the middle of the

night he'd got a panic alarm he wasn't wearing it so of course he didn't alert the panic

emergency situation and the first person to see him in the morning was the carer by which time

he had third degree burns oh no and he was whipped into a specialized uh burns unit unit

where he was for two and a half months because he had to have skin grafts he almost died he

got pneumonia at the works. He was a very, very, very ill man. Of course, again, he's all on the back

end of our mother quite recently having passed away. He was in the room here for two and a half

months, went into a sort of a rehab hospital type facility. By now, of course, my

brother and I were of the opinion that there's just no way he can stay

on his own. Just no way. He's not safe. But, and this is

a quirk of the law. I realise this isn't necessarily anything to do with this conversation

as such, but the law states if the individual has capacity and they want to stay

at home, it doesn't matter if they can't walk, it doesn't matter if they can't really look after themselves, then they

are allowed to stay at home. Anyway, we're offered six weeks respite

in this hospital. So he wants to stay at home, does he? So because his condition

is physical rather than involving mental decline, he has capacity and if he says he wants to stay at home

there's not a great deal you can do about it. There is literally nothing

as family. So he's quite a strong-willed man and all the conversations

Well, he was. Right. He was. Not so much now, but he was

Of course. Anyway, the rehab facility, we were supposed to have six weeks

kicked him out after two weeks. We were hoping to have that time to plan

Wow. To have the conversations with him to get him to understand

that, Dad, this is not sustainable. Yeah. This is not safe. we can't carry on like this we need

to find somewhere for you to live that is far safer but of course that was taken away from us

because he was kicked out within two weeks did they tell you why? because as far as they were concerned

there's nothing more that they could do the whole idea in the facility

was to get him stronger after having this horrific two and a half months

phone lines falling apart is typical i don't want to give up yet which tried once again just to get to the get to the

no we're gonna to the end of that story just in terms of wondering what's happened to her dad

um we can come back after the news i don't i don't think i want to move on but i tell you

what i do want to do i want to nudge it into the political now listen i sometimes worry that you

think i'm exaggerating when i tell you how stupid i am but i promise you i'm not i there are some

things i just haven't got my head around and i was reading up this morning before we came on air

i'll tell you exactly what i was reading because i've got it in front of me it's a nine-year-old article by philip inman in the guardian about the social care funding and quotes dementia attacks

that theresa may introduced and i've read it twice and i'm still not 100 sure on why this is such

a political hot potato so we'll move into that next as well james o'brien on lbc three minutes

after 11 and um i just listen i i don't know why teresa may's proposal was so unpopular i do know

that dan needle the the tax expert who um very rarely pokes his head above the public parapet

without saying something incredibly interesting and helpful he has pointed out in a very lengthy

thread which i think has been collated on his website taxpolicy.org he has pointed out that

Theresa May actually deserves a lot more credit for trying to come up with a half-decent idea

She tried to do the right thing, but what did she try to do? Because if I look up why was it so unpopular

then I'm reading about people who receive home care or residential care

will have to pay for it using their properties and savings and assets

provided they kept £100,000. And I thought that was what was going on now, except that the threshold was 23

£3,000. So I really mean it when I say, I know you sometimes think I'm exaggerating when I tell you how stupid I am, but I do not understand this

And you might want to argue that I should get my head around it before I come on the radio, but I haven't

And the phone lines are open. 0345 6060 973. Is it as simple as this? One Tory leader says, we need to raise more money

And another Tory leader, as in Kemi Bader not this morning, has said, oh, no, you don't

because when we did this on the phones, and I just checked with some colleagues during the break

because I can't really remember this. There was a week I was on holiday once when Jeremy Hunt and Wes Streeting both did the show

So you had the health secretary and the shadow health secretary. So if there was something in our collective memory banks

that looks like a neat and easy answer to this, I'd remember it

Or we'd remember it collectively as a team. But we've got a memory of lots of what you might call boomer Tories

having a fit of the vapours about Theresa May's proposal. That's what did for her

So it would be sort of telegraphed Daily Mail led. And Johnson, of course, lied about having a plan

Do you remember? I'm not dreaming that, am I? Didn't Boris Johnson say he had a plan that was good to go

the minute he got into Downing Street, he'd be able to implement his social care plan and then he got into Downing Street

and we never heard hide nor hair of it again? God, it's so easy to forget how awful he was, isn't it

But why? Why? So I want to get on to that, but I just want to give Lisa a chance

We tried with the phone line, but it's one of those, we're in the lap of the gods on this

So your dad was back at home, and you hadn't had the chance to make arrangements for him

because he came out of the rehab a month before you were expecting him to, Lisa

What happened next? Exactly. So he was at home for two and a half weeks

He had numerous falls in and out of hospital, and there's a cost to that. This is what's crazy

The cost of the hospital stays set against a tax doesn't make sense

But anyway, eventually we got him to agree to respite, and he's now in a care home

The care home is costing £7,500 a month. And don't get me wrong, we do not resent that

It's a nice place. It's certainly not palatial. It is certainly not palatial

Where's the money coming from? He's funding, self-funding. He sold that. The house is sold

Right, okay. The family house is sold. Yes. And so he's paying it himself

And that's where we're at. And I think that the infuriating thing for myself and my brother

A, there was no one to talk with that could guide us through this process

No one at all. We were just left to try and, as I say, make it up ourselves, really

And when you've just lost your mum, you're not in the best place to start doing all of this

The second thing is, because he has Parkinson's, not every home will accept somebody with Parkinson's

So of course that limited the pool that we could explore And then finally and genuinely James my brother and I do not want any kind of inheritance from our father

Neither of us need it. We're fine. That said, I look at him in the care home and I think, my days, you know

He was never a rich man. He wasn't a poor man. He wasn't a rich man. He worked all of his life, the usual story

He thankfully never needed to draw on welfare or whatever. thankfully. I realise that's a gift

in and of itself, but I look at him now and I think

this is just so wrong that there was nothing in place to help

you when you needed it. Well, there would have been... No, there wouldn't have been either, because he's got..

But if he didn't have any assets, he wouldn't have been sort of locked in a cupboard

somewhere. They would have found... So if he had less than £23,000

to his name, they would have found somewhere less pleasant for him

That is true. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm thinking out loud. I'm not correcting you or criticizing you

I'm just trying to work out what the score is for everybody. And if you didn't have £7,500 a month

then he would have ended up somewhere even less palatial than the place that he's ended up

Well, I mean, so I'm told on the one hand, but then on the other hand, I know there are people at his home

And again, I do not begrudging for those people. But there are people in the home that he's in

that our self-funding didn't have the assets. And so essentially they have a slightly less pleasant room

So it's like being in a hospital that's got private wards and public wards and you can pay for a private room

Yeah, I mean, and do you know, you're a lovely person. Everyone who's called me today sounds so nice

And it breaks my heart that we're all at pains to prove that we're not Daily Mail commenters

Genuinely not. Genuinely not. But do you know what I mean? It's like you do it and Debra did it

and I think Jane in Stockport did it, you're sort of saying, look, I understand life is a lottery

I understand fairness and unfairness. I don't think that I was... I scored a hat-trick because I was born three and a half

My dad's got seven and a half grand a month, and I appreciate that there's going to be people

who work just as hard as he did for all their lives and end up without a pot to pee in at the end of it

But I wonder whether the reason why it is politically contentious, Lisa

is because so many people think that they've got money at the end of their life as a consequence of having been wise

and clever and hardworking rather than just as a consequence of spinning the wheel

and getting a little bit luckier than other people. And then you spin the wheel again and you end up with or without Parkinson's

or with or without dementia. But everybody clings to the notion that somehow it's all about actions and consequences

when it's just the fickle finger of fate, isn't it? Do we know why it's so expensive? Do we know why it's so... Go on

I have no idea. I genuinely have no idea. When I visit, I say again, the staff are lovely

I am not criticising that in the slightest but I look around

and I think well you know what it's not like the furnishings are plush

it's not like his room is plush it's functional and it's clean

and it's got a window onto a garden but it's not five star hotel

standard care home for £7,500 No I hear you and there will be reasons for that that are obvious

like the fact that it's 24 hour care and there are things that

are way beyond what you'd get in a hotel and things like that, but there are some reasons that are not obvious

Do you know why it's so contentious politically? What's your one-sentence answer to that question

I think one, I mean, some of the other callers have covered this. One, it seems so far down the road for a lot of people

Yeah. You know, and they're looking at their parents, as I did when my parents were in their 50s

never imagining them as very old people with issues. Yeah. So I think there's that issue

I genuinely understand that there are so many people that are counting the pennies just to pay for the lecky

And hence, the very idea that they've got a coffer with another however much

towards very old people that have nothing to do with them, that galls a little

And I don't think that's right, but I understand that as a reason. Also, I think at the moment, you know, there's all this talk around triple lock

and older people having it easy. And I wish I'd got your money at the age of 30 that you've got at 80

and all that sort of stuff. And again, I know those arguments are very valid in many respects

and they come from a place where young people are truly struggling

I think a lot of it is just born out of this setting one group of people

against another group of people, instead of realising that none of us are going to get out of this thing alive

Let's try and do the best for each of us, you know? It'll never catch on, but you're inspiring

Thank you, Lisa. And she's right, of course. And that's why I do wonder whether you can manage to somehow get the word insurance into the public conversation

rather than, for example, the word tax. And it creates a different feeling because that's what Lisa is describing

It's what I'm asking when we talk about political contentiousness. Is it as simple as that

Is it just that, you know, as Kami Bader not has very helpfully demonstrated today

some people refuse to accept that you need to pay for the provision of care

And there is a relatively good chance that you won't need it. so why the hell should you pay for it

You know that play at the National Theatre that Michael Sheen was in? What was it called

Was it called Nye? So it's the life story of a Nye in Bevan

I, uh... My mum met a Nye in Bevan, you know. My grandad was a great trade genius

I never met him in the Sheffield Steelworks and he'd take her to public meetings

and to see political figures speak and she saw Nye Bevan speak at a hotel in Sheffield

And I didn't know until I watched that play. I kind of had it filed away in the back of my mind

from doing a politics A-level. A huge resistance to the formation of the NHS

Presumably for the same reasons. Presumably because, well, why should I pay

I'm not ill. Am I being simplistic? Or just wrong? So Bader not writes a letter to say

well, we can't possibly increase taxes. I absolutely refuse to increase. So how are you going to pay for all the new stuff

well, we'll take it all off disabled people or kids with anxiety

or bad news 51% of the, or 49% it's almost the infernal ratio 49

of the social care budget goes on working age adults so, you know, people who need

care, either residential care or care in their own homes half of the budget, half of the

£21.4 billion budget It goes on working-age adults. And, of course, these figures are going to change

as we live longer and longer and longer. And the working-age adults, of course, migrate into

or graduate into the 65 and over category. So, you know, only part of the problems that we're discussing

are going to be addressed, let alone solved, by focusing on old people

I'll go to Lauren and Nisga instead next. And then, hopefully, and I'll do that after the break

because I want to read you this. You can just bear with me, all right

this is and it's not my work i wish it was it's brilliant this is dan needle um uh from uh tax

policy associates who describes himself of course famously as a tax realist and and he is he knows

his stuff as he's tried to do an allegory right and and you know how much we love allegories

because they sometimes make complicated subjects a little bit easier to understand i'm going to read

first line of the allegory and then and then we'll go to a break and then i'll read you the

rest of it it's your 65th birthday right so this is what we all do on your 65th birthday you shuffle

a deck and actually no i'm going to start at the very very beginning i have a modest proposal for

a new tax it involves a deck of cards and a monkey throwing darts a modest proposal for a new tax

that involves a deck of cards and a monkey throwing darts. After this, I will explain to you, or rather Dan Needle will explain to you

why that is a pretty accurate description of social care funding and provision in England today

James O'Brien on LBC. Monkeys have pretty good hand-to-eye coordination, that writes Ron

If they got a banana every time they hit a bullseye, they'd probably get pretty good at darts. You've almost pre-empted a topic I wanted to do on the programme, Ron

but I've decided not to. The more I watch Luke Littler, the more I wonder whether he is going to surpass

Muhammad Ali as the greatest sportsman of all time, which is odd, given that Muhammad Ali

was such an extraordinary specimen of humanity. And Luke Littler, and I make no bones or criticism about this

because I'm not exactly an oil painting myself, he looks like he's fallen out of a kebab shop

in the last 20 minutes, and according to what I've read about his diet, it's perfectly possible that he has

and fair play to him. but the standard of dance that he plays

and the way that he is continuing I think everyone was expecting a wobble

just continuing to see off all comers makes me wonder whether it is

because dance is just throwing arrows at a board but what is football

if not just banging a bladder around a field with your feet is it fair to suggest that Luke Littler

could become a more complete sporting triumph than Lionel Messi, Mohamed Ali and Novak Djokovic combined

He is going to dominate his sports in the ways that those other sports people can only dream of

But then Ron, on a completely different subject, sends in a message saying monkeys have pretty good hand-to-eye coordination

If they got a banana every time they hit a bullseye, they'd probably get pretty good at darts too

And I wonder whether actually the snobs are right and that darts doesn't deserve to be spoken of in the same breath

as all the other sports I just spoke of. most obviously tennis, football and boxing

Anyway, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about this. I have a modest proposal for a new tax

that involves a deck of cards and a monkey throwing darts. Here are the rules. Right, pay attention

Because if, like me, you are blissfully ignorant of what might be on the horizon

either for you or for your loved ones, this is the situation in England

And because we've carried this on for a second hour, we can actually recognise the fact this is unique to England

And if you're in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, you give us a ring and tell us what's going on where you are

and what we can learn from you. On your 65th birthday, you shuffle a deck of cards and draw one

If it's an ace or a king, congratulations. One day you will pay my new tax

Any other card, and you will never pay a penny of it. You're not told when

The tax might start when you're 68. It might start when you're 95. It might start the week after your wife dies

I know, but you don't. There's no way to find out in advance and there's no way to insure against it

An official decides whether to give you a wildcard that will exempt you from the tax

Some officials hand out wildcards 3% at the time, others 60%. A wildcard means you're exempt from the tax

You don't have to pay it. If you don't get a wildcard, it's time to pay. At which point, a monkey throws a dart with your name on it at a board full of numbers

It lands somewhere between 58,000 and 68,000, and that's your tax bill for that year

We've spoken to people like that. If you're paying seven grand a month, six grand a month, it's in excess of 66,000

That's your tax bill for the year. Monkey's thrown a dart. It's hit the number. That's what you have to pay

Half of all players are finished inside 15 months. You don't need me to explain why

But for more than a quarter, and this is all of our callers today, you keep spinning for over three years and sometimes more than 20

Every year, the monkey throws a new dart and you get a new bill

If your income won't cover the tax, and it probably won't, you have to sell stuff to fund it

If you've got under £14,250 worth of assets, your council pays this tax instead of you, which of course

goes on to everybody's council tax. If you've got between £14,000 and

£23,000 and a bit, you pay a pound a week for every £250, you have

over £14,250. Are you still with me at the back? I told you it was complicated. The council

pays the rest. If you've got over £23,250, you pay the whole of the monkey's number

yourself every year until you die. That's the system in England. Why is it so

impossible politically to fix it? I don't know. Dan Needle then injects some

socialism into the randomness. 30% of the tax is paid by rich losers

who are paying in full. Goes to the people who also lost but don't have

enough income or assets to pay for themselves. Your house is in play. It doesn't

count as an asset while you, your partner or an elderly relative still lives in it. But

once you've all moved out, you get 12 weeks and then it's part of your assets. You may lose almost everything you have ever owned

at which point you get £31.80 a week to live on. So don't spend it all at once

And that is exactly how catastrophic adult social care costs work in England today

People who win the game or who haven't played also lose because adult social care now dominates many council budgets

And Theresa May had a crack at fixing it and it pretty much wrote her political death warrant

and I don't understand the politics. I don't understand why, except that Kemi Bainock's already insisting

that they can't raise taxes to find the money that's so obviously needed, in which case they can't find the money

if you subscribe to her politics. I don't know. Lauren's in East Grinstead

Lauren, what made you pick up the phone? Good morning. I was ringing really to highlight the difference

between my mum and her sister, who both lived to a ripe old age

no longer with us, But my mother lived independently until she was in her 90s

Then she had a stroke and went into hospital. Then it was decided that she couldn't go back home

She was living 60 miles away from me. Right. She couldn't go back home and live independently

So the social worker was assigned to her said, you need to find a fair home

And so then he couldn't help me because he didn't know my locality

So I searched up and found him. Because you wanted one near you, not near where she lived

I wanted to move mum to be nearer to me so I could sort of pop in, which I did

But just finding one, I mean, what an eye-opener. It was the most stressful time

And I said to your colleague, I mean, I went into one place

and as soon as I walked in, I thought, I wouldn't tunnel my dog in here. And that had a good CQC rating

It was awful. It was so grim. Why? How? Tell me more

Well, for a start, it stank as soon as you walked in. Of wee-wee

Of wee. Yeah. I was going to say that earlier, but I chose not to, but I'm glad you have

Go on. And then I was shown into a big conservatory very big conservatory where all the chairs with the residents were pushed back against the walls And there wasn a TV on there wasn a radio on they were just sat not even in groups they were just sat against the wall And then we went to look at the rooms

the rooms all had vinyl floors, and I was told that they had a good CTC rating because of the

vinyl floors, so there was nothing homely about it. And there was room after room after room

of very, very elderly people who were just staring at the ceiling

It was just awful. And there were other places that were better

But anyway, and then while mum was still in hospital and I was still looking, I had a call from the bed manager

who said to me, have you found a place for your mother yet

Because she has been in hospital for some time. And I said, well, it's only been a week

since I was told to find her home. and well, she has been in here for some time

and I just said, no, she hasn't. I'm doing my best here to find somewhere

and eventually we did find a place and it was very good

The place where she was cost about, in this area, 1,800 to 2,000 pounds a week

Okay, wow. Now, she had a little bungalow. Yes. It would seem that the local authorities will only pay up to a certain amount

And if you want anywhere better than what their money will pay for, you have to subsidize it, which we did through selling her bungalow

So she was one of the people who, you know, had to fund her own

Yes, because she had assets. Because she had assets. But interestingly, I was told that certain assets are counted and certain assets are not

So if you have some very valuable jewellery or a very valuable painting

those things are not included. But if you try and hide any assets, so for example

if you spend some cash on a car or you give it away to your children

or whatever, grandchildren, nieces, that will be discovered. I think there's a seven-year thing as well

Well, that's inheritance tax, isn't it? If you pass away less than seven years after giving somebody some money

it becomes eligible for inheritance tax as well. I'm not even sure if that's right. What happened with your aunt

You can't hide, sorry? What happened with your aunt? Ah, well, my aunt had rented, so she didn't own her own home

So she went into a local authorities paper by the local authority

into a very, very similar care home, but that was actually fully funded by the local authority

And that's just how it is. And I fully expect myself for my home to be my care home when the time comes

What do you... Is this... Do you feel that there was an unfairness attached to the fact

that your mum paid for the same provision that your aunt didn't pay for

I don't feel any resentment about it. But do you think other people do

Because I'm trying to work out the motivation of the callers to LBC when they are adamant

And to be fair, I haven't invited them to ring in today, but when they're adamant that Theresa May's proposals

that, you know, Kemi Bader-Knot's writing letters saying taxes cannot go up

which means things will stay exactly as they are. Is there a sense that there's something, because it's your aunt

so you're not going to chalk her up as a lifelong malingerer who's spent all her money on flat-screen TVs and Benson and Hedges

Well, for the future. More people now seem to be renting and buying homes

So, I mean, looking towards the future, there's not going to be so many homes to sell to fund later life care

But do you understand why it's so politically fraught, this subject? Is it because of your mum and your aunt

Not specifically, but would that be an example? I think so. I think there's a perception that it's not fair that some people pay

and some people don't pay. So I'm being punished for working hard. I'm being punished for saving. I'm being punished for being careful

I don't really think that way. I mean, I just think I'm fortunate. I'm not putting words into someone else's mouth, not yours, for heaven's sake, Lauren

Keep up, will you? Honestly. But that's where it's coming from. It is that..

There is that perception. And one of the things I don't understand, years ago

there were more local authority homes around. My aunt's home was an authority-led or funded home, and it was lovely

but now more and more homes are privatised so in a sense I don't

understand why local authorities have all handed over this responsibility to the

private sector well I mean it will have been cheaper in the short term

and yet of course in the long term it will not, same reason they privatised

water, I mean you know they made money out of it at some point I don't know, I mean in the past

when I've thrown open the phone lines on that specific question I don't get conclusive proof that private equity is running away with millions and millions of pounds

and I do get lots and lots of people who are running care homes who are not in private equity, private care homes, privately owned

who insist that they are working their own fingers to the bone on relatively small margins

so I don't know actually, again it's a celebration of my own ignorance this topic

but that's the point isn't it Lauren? It's one of those things about which none of us know anything until we suddenly need to know everything

And now I've got Richard Flippin Osman buzzing away in the back of my mind

because his books, of course, his crime books are set in elderly homes, not care homes

It's just where the quality of life is absolutely extraordinary. It's like living in clarages

So, you know, that relationship between assets, wealth, income, and a sense of the deserving and the undeserving poor

and the political resistance to a solution being built upon the idea that I would be paying for people who..

I'd be paying for people who haven't paid to receive something that I don't need

Is that what it is? And that is probably why the Tories were massively, including most doctors, by the way

were massively opposed to the NHS with an iron Bevan. As a consequence, if I remember correctly

as a consequence of understanding the need for everybody to pay into a pot

out of which not everybody would take, but everybody would be able to if they needed

Something that I think he learned during a miners' strike in Wales when there was enough money just for people to survive while on strike

because they'd all paid into it. And wives and children would get it as well, not just miners

like a welfare fund. and I think that is where the seeds were sown in his mind

his magnificent, beautiful mind, for the National Health Service. We all pay into it

and even the people who don't pay into it, the children, the non-working mothers and wives

to go back to the era in which Nybevan was operating, they take out of it as well when they need to

and social care is not like that. It's the polar opposite. Of course, we live in a world where people think socialism is a dirty word

without realising that the National Health Service is probably one of the greatest creations

in the history of humanity And it flawed now and in need of reform and improvement Of course it is But its roots pure socialism Here Dominic Ellis with the headlines

James O'Brien on LBC. 34 is the time. So, is it... OK, listen, I'm owning my stupidity

Ignorance. I'm not stupid, obviously. But I am ignorant on this subject

And many others, actually. But I usually do a fairly good job of masking it. Why was Theresa May's proposal so unpopular

0345 6060 973. Because at the moment, the threshold above which you have to sell stuff

in order to pay for your social care is £23,250. Under Theresa May, it would have been £100,000

So how can it be unpopular? As in, you get to keep more of your money

Were you going to have to pay even if you didn't need to? Listen, you can tell, I think

that I'm not pretending to not understand this stuff. I do not understand this stuff

Why was, looking back, Theresa May's so-called dementia tax, there must have been another dimension to it, wasn't there

Because people's inheritance was threatened by factoring home values into care costs

I don't know. Phone lines are open. And this is... I can't remember the last time I did this

It's a very, very widespread, very widely known story. I didn't really pay that much attention to it at the time

I'm sorry. I cannot, for the life of me, remember why Theresa May's so-called dementia tax was so unpopular

0345 6060 973 is the number that you need. Listen, I probably had too many people ringing in with their own experiences

to successfully kick off the second element of the conversation, which is about the political contentiousness of this

That's just the price you pay for having a full switchboard sometimes, and that's fine

And I don't want to turn you away if your story is illuminating and interesting

which it will be, because this is a very, very febrile issue

But what I haven't had, and what I do want, simple question

what happens in Scotland? 0345 6060973. Listen, you can absolutely give me a coating for being Anglo-centric or even London-centric

but what happens in Scotland? I know that there are four separate systems

in one country, if you like. Four settlements, four nations, four settlements

England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. We've been talking exclusively about England. Can we learn from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland

If so, what can we learn? What goes on? 0345 6060 973 is the number that you need

11.36 is the time. Bob's in Fulham. Bob, what would you like to say

James I'm not going to go through a lot of detail what my brother and I had to do with my mother

but it reflects quite closely to what a lot of other people said I just wanted to emphasize one thing

please please please people get power of attorney for any of your relatives that you think

they're getting anywhere near not being able to handle their affairs if you don't have that it's infinitely more difficult

also once you've got power of attorney which someone has also mentioned it's in two parts

There's one for medical and one for finances. Get the backing of your siblings as to

and everyone agree, it's your mum's money. Any money she's got. I've got my own theory

Why it's so expensive. Yes. I'm sorry, I do think people are making massive profits out of it

I also feel that this is another example, I'm afraid, James, of the whole government system

and I'm not blaming one party or the other. I'm saying the whole. And it would be the same if some of the new parties got in

It's not fit for purpose. They cannot take long-term, proper, professional approaches

to projects like this. This is not a quick solution, James. I know no one is saying it is

And it does need, across the board, consensus of sense of fairness

And this is my answer to you as to why we didn't like Theresa May, or why not me

People want to see a sense of fairness. I thought her proposal was fair

Well, I... Yeah, but you will get some people saying, right, yes, but..

Well, what will they say? What's the actual grievance, Bob? Because some people have got more than £100,000 savings

Some people on the million will say, well, I want it bumped up to a million. And if I can give you a small example of that

for example... But it was property and assets of £100,000, which is 75 grand more than where we are now

So why did people object to that? There's an answer to this question

and it's possible neither of us know it, but there must be an answer to this question, and it will involve the thing that I am missing

So here's a system under which you're going to take everything I've got

in excess of £25,000, and Theresa May said we're going to take everything you've got

in excess of £100,000. Why would I object to that? I'm 75 grand better off

Yeah, but there's a lot of people out there that have got a lot more than that

and they want all their money protected. If I can give you a small example..

That doesn't make sense, Bob. Can I just give you my little small example? Well, hang on. No, you can't

No, it answers that. Does it? It better. I'm prepared to pay more into the system

I am prepared... You're not answering the question of why I object to a £100,000 threshold

when the threshold is currently much lower than that. Because you've got a quarter of a million pounds... Yes

And once the 100,000, you know, you want to be covered up the quarter of a million

because you think you should be covered for everything. Yeah, but it's 25 grand at the moment

I know, I know. So why am I closer than I am at 20, at 100

than I am at 25 when it's 75,000 pounds more? I'm being thick. I know I'm being thick

but you don't know the answer either. I'm trying to answer it from my perspective

That's why I think they did. They're really rich people. In the same way, James, I'm very fortunate

I'd be very happy to give up my heating as a pensioner, I'm 73

I'd be very happy to give it up I'd be very happy to pay a lot more

tax, I really would because this is a massive issue, this care home thing

No, I know, but we don't know I don't want to sound impatient but you don't know the answer to the question that I'm asking

Because some people are not prepared to pay enough into the system But they'd be better off under Theresa May's system

than they were previously You see? You've covered a lot of topics in the past, James

where actually the logic doesn't come into it. You know what, Bob? You could be right, mate

And it's an emotive feeling. I want to be covered. Why should the person..

I've saved two million, I should be covered. Instead of thinking, I should be lucky I've got two million

But the elephant in the room is the sense of fairness across the whole board, and it's not just the care homes

I will pay more into the system, James, but I just want a sense of fairness

thank god I had power of attorney and thank god my mum

Besser Cotton Socks had saved money and it was her money and we had to use that

it was four years ago now but that was 7,000 what do you mean briefly what do you mean by fairness

because the people who can afford to pay for it currently have to pay for it

while the people who can't afford to pay for it don't is that not fair in your mind because

because unfortunately some people and I have to say and this is a weakness in myself I have to say sometimes I fall into the trap I get angry when I see people in there who put nothing into the system

and getting everything that my poor old mum is having to pay for. Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think..

And I'm sorry. I apologise. No, you don't apologise. No, don't apologise. It's a perfectly natural feeling

But is that it? I mean, is it that simple that A, it's emotive rather than an intellectual objection

and B, why should they get it for free when we have to pay for it

To which the answer is because they haven't got any money. But that doesn't matter. That's not fair

Why should I have to pay for something that they get for free? Maybe that's it

But then I'm stuck, and I appreciate it. It's a bit like a bear with a sore head on that

Because I get so frustrated when I'm almost certainly missing something quite simple

Could it really be, as Bob says, that all of the people that were objecting to Theresa May's proposal were just idiots

Because they were actually going to be hit with a £100,000 threshold where previously it was £23,000

Oh, man alive. From Bob to Rob. And actually, speaking of Bob, have we done that calculation yet

Do we know what the current Bob is? What is the Burnham optimism barometer telling us

All you have to do is add up all the numbers and then divide them by the number of numbers

So what's the figure? You're just going to make something up now, aren't you? Of course it's easy. Ah, dear. I'll do it myself

It's 11.43. Rob's in Hamburg. Rob, what would you like to say? Good morning, James. I'm Sonny Hamburg

I thought you and your listeners might be interested to know what Helmut Kohl introduced here in 1995 with regard to senior citizen or elderly care

We all have here private insurance. It's not particularly exclusive. There is no national health system here

And it's quite expensive. It's almost 20% of your income of which your employer or the government pays half

But in 1995, Helmut Kohl introduced a tax or investment. if I could translate it, it's elderly care or senior citizen care

4.2% of your gross income. If you have children, it's 3.8%. When senior citizens..

Why is it less for parents? Well, if you have... Well, of course, parents have a number of financial and tax..

Oh, yeah, no, fair enough. Yeah, fair enough. Sorry, I'm just being... But it's 4.2%

I was telling your colleague, in my circle of friends, acquaintances, neighbour and colleagues, nobody complains about this tax

We get it drummed into us, into the news and in television magazine programmes

We have a particular demographic problem here in Germany, which is why Frau Merkel wanted to get a lot of people with other cultural roots in here

That's just one of the things. and it's really jumped into us that there's no alternative we have got to pay this extra tax and

most of us see it as a good investment who wants to be in discomfort or pain you know health care

is expensive here and it's getting more expensive and even at the very high level of quality here

one of the main aims of the president government is to try and improve it further so why did it

Why did it crash and burn then? I mean, because what you're describing, it might have a little bit of short-term objection

based upon what Bob was describing as this sort of inbuilt sense of

either I jolly well deserve all the money that I've accrued in the course of my life

and anybody who hasn't accrued any money is probably a workshy layabout with a flat-screen television

But, you know, and of course, 4.8, 3.2, whatever you're putting in... 4.2%

I'm reading it here now. My main health insurance is 14.6%, and my senior health care is 4.2%

See, we call it health insurance because that's how it is broken down. But I look at my income tax bill, and I can go on the website and see the pie chart of how much of that goes to the NHS

So in some ways, it's a similar principle. It's just counted differently, and it's called a different thing

But the idea is that everybody pays in and only some people take out, right

Oh, no. Over here, we see it a bit more from a social aspect. we hope it's not us

but we gladly pay for our friends you've done it, you're the winner

so that is a cultural difference is it? yes it is a little bit

I'm not going to suggest everything's perfect it's not, we have some horrendous problems

but what social and healthcare regarding those things in all my I'm retired now fortunately

but my colleagues with whom you spend almost a third of your life

and my friends and neighbours we never complain about the, really, about the cost or availability of health care

although that is starting to change because it's also starting to buckle. But you know the other day, James, you were mentioning about

you can afford a holiday but not that holiday. Yeah. That's what we want from Andy Burnham and others

Good leadership, a bit of statementship, and someone to come on the telly and say

look, folks, I'm sorry, I've got bad news. We've been living beyond our means

We can't do this. Well, what's your optimism quotient at the moment? Well, he's between seven and eight

But, of course, I'm one of those people, since I left the UK, I haven't had a vote anywhere

I just have to put up with everything. It's overrated, mate. As it is, there's a talk this morning about compulsory voting being introduced

which strikes me as a very good old-fashioned phone-in. But I don't know what we're going to do after 12, actually

There's only one way to find out. You better stay tuned. Thank you, Rob, and thank you to Bob, who was on before Rob

and was possibly on the receiving end of my impatience with my own failure to understand the issue

so sorry if I was a little robust. But I still don't get it

I still don't get it. Why did Theresa May's thing crash and burn

when all it did was increase the threshold on your property and saving assets

And who, I don't, I mean, I hate it when I feel stupid on the radio

You're probably used to it, but most of the time when I'm being stupid on the radio, I'm too stupid to realise I'm being stupid

James O'Brien on LBC. 1151, you're listening to James O'Brien on LBC

Listen, I hope this doesn't reach your ears as a bit of a cop-out, right? But sometimes I think the failure to understand something is the point

So I obviously am a little bit embarrassed that I can't work out

why Theresa May's so-called dementia tax was so unpopular. There's one bit that's missing from what I've told you so far

It would have extended that calculation onto what you have to pay for from people in care homes to people receiving care in their own homes

So you'd have been on the hook for that if you had assets worth more than £23,500

but they wouldn't have come for your home until after you were no longer in it, if you see what I mean

whether you'd been taken out of it, you know, having passed away, or whether you'd moved into a home

So was it just people eyeing up an erosion of their expected inheritance

Or was it just because it happened in a general election campaign and felt a bit cheeky

You know, Theresa May presumably thought this would be a vote winner

Admittedly, she was being advised by one of the most ridiculous people in modern politics, Nick Timothy

but Theresa May herself was no slouch. She obviously thought it would be a vote winner

and it ended up being the opposite. It ended up being a vote hemorrhage. And why

Because people felt that their own money was being taken away and that great mythical undeserving blob was going to..

I don't know, but that could be the point. My failure to understand this could be..

The point is why this is such a tricky, thorny, impenetrable political issue

11.52 is the time. Andy's in Chelmswood. Andy, what would you like to say? Oh, hi, James. There may be an extra point to this you're missing about Theresa May

Well, there must be. There must be, Andy. By all that's holy, there has to be something missing

Can I just quickly tell you what I think it is? Yes, go on. Okay. Right, the first crack she had at this, because she initially put out a plan and there was a backlash

and she did the second plan. Right. The first plan was to cut it at £100,000

Yeah. Okay? Which, as you say, would have been an advantage to everybody. Yeah. But there was a big backlash from people down south

because they said, right, the average price for a house up north in those days

was about 200 grand, and down south it was about 750, 800 grand

Are you sure? This is your full memory, 20-20 hindsight. No, no, no, no, I completely remember this. Okay

But people down south complained and said, this is unfair, it's disproportionate

because we are having to pay an awful lot more of the value of our house. So what Theresa May did was turn around and say, right

what I'm suggesting I'll do now, I'll put a £200,000 cap on it

so you only pay £200,000, OK? And then the people down south said, this is, sorry

the people up north said, this is ridiculous. If we've got a £300,000 house, we pay two-thirds of it

whereas people down south have got a million-pound house, still get left with the £800,000

So everyone up north got upset. So it was the first thing was a £100,000 cap

But the second thing was the £200,000 absolute amount. So that meant she was getting flags from both sides of the country

and then she gave up on it. Do you want the good news or the bad news? Go on, give me the bad news

I haven't felt like this since I was studying my AO level in statistics. OK, sorry

That's all right. OK. The good news is I think you're probably right

OK, right, yeah, thank you. My God, you're admitting I'm right. I think you are, because that makes..

I mean, the cap is a huge issue, right? Because that's going to have a massive impact

depending on geography. Yeah. And then the bit that we don't get

is the £100,000 being something too objective, even if you are living down south

because at the moment it's a quarter of them. Oh, I agree. I completely agree. The whole thing was ludicrous

Everyone had been far better off if they'd just taken a £100,000 cab and gone. So it was the Daily Blimey Mail, probably

I mean, I don't remember who led the objections to it, but it's usually them, isn't it

Well, they definitely complained about the £100,000... Sorry. The Daily Mail complained about the £100,000 cab

and then basically the left wing complained about the... So no one could win

So what should Andy... There you go. Seeing as you're currently a teacher's pet, what should Andy Burnham do

Ah, crikey. I'm in the same situation as a lot of people

I've got a mother and a care home. Right. And I had to sell her house last year to pay the care home. Yeah

So, and I went through exactly what everybody else went through, the whole thing. I had to find it myself

You didn't know what you were doing and blah, blah, blah. So that was unpleasant. The one thing I will say in my mother's care home, because she's in one that's quite nice

Having said that, I had to move her up to Hexham from Oxford. But the one that she's quite nice, weirdly, isn't much more expensive than the ones that aren't nice

The big difference is that I found the care home my mother's in, very nice care home

And they've got like little suites where you've got like a living room and a bedroom and a bathroom separate

and it seems to me that if you're funding the care yourself you get put into one of those rooms

if you're not funding it, you don't but I mean, it's a slight silver lining to this

I have checked it with the care home and if my mother ever does run out of money

which is a very nice care home all they do is they move her out of one of the better rooms

they move her into a slightly worse room but all the rooms are very nice and the care home is lovely

and that makes you lucky well yeah, very lucky, yeah I know you know that

And of course, the thing that is hardest to quantify almost politically is luck

Very few people want to admit that they're lucky, or at least the loudest voices in our politics now for my entire life, I think

are very resistant to the idea that they're lucky, that there's only luck involved. It's a lottery. It's a complete lottery when you come to care homes

And you're Scottish, so do you know, do you happen to know what would have happened if..

I don't, because I've lived down in England for 40 years. I don't know

London? Sorry? London? Okay, yeah. It's 11.50. It's the number of people this weekend

Well, I say the number of people. I've had a lot of messages saying I can't hear the word London now without hearing London in my own head

But on one occasion, when I was in Morrison's walking past the cooked meat

someone went, London? Stop for a chat. I don't think we'll stay with it

because it would drive Keith mad, I imagine, trying to listen out for that. But it was rather lovely while it lasted

Anyway, we've got a new seat. now we've got bob we've got the burnham optimism barometer which um is still broken apparently hang

on just let me we go can we get can we get a figure for is that any no okay uh mike's in

ripon and did you see there is a lovely thing satnam sangira but one of my favorite writers

got a great book out at the moment about george michael he ended up in ripon at the weekend and

he couldn't believe his eyes mike he couldn't believe his eyes it's such a beautiful really

just the cathedral, the beauty of the place and how little known it is outside North Yorkshire

That was his thesis. Very discerning man. Very discerning man. It's got my second..

I mean, Fountains Abbey's just up the road for you, which is my second favourite ruined abbey in North Yorkshire, Mike

It is lovely. It is lovely. Go on, what made you pick up the phone? OK, well, I have some authority, I think, to speak

My wife died recently with dementia. I'm very sorry. Thank you. She lived in a care home for the last three and a half years of her life, and she had care at home before that

In total, we spent over £400,000 caring for my wife. The situation here, the value of the house is immaterial because so long as the spouse, i.e. me, lives in the house, that's okay

Yes. So that doesn't come into the equation. But the problem with Trees and May's plan was

if you take two people, one that starts off with, say, £120,000 of assets

and the other starts off with a million, they would spend, respectively

£20,000 in the first case or £900,000 in the second case before they both end up with £100,000

Yeah. And there, which is quite a sum of money... But is that not what happens anyway

It's a sense of a million. But isn't that what happens anyway with £23,500 being there

Yeah, so you are right to the extent... So you'd have been left with more than you would have been left

before she introduced. Yeah, but you would. But one person has only lost or spent £20,000

so they still feel as though they've got £100,000, which is more or less where they started from

But the person that started with a million has lost £900,000 if the person lives that long

Yeah, I get that. And they're only left with £100,000, which, you know, they've been wiped out, really

Yeah, but it's a lot more than 23,250,000. Okay. I don't know how much money you've got

but if you lost 90% of it, would you feel as though you'd been..

No, you're not. You'd had a bad day. One of us is missing the point here

and I've got a horrible feeling it's me, because it doesn't matter how much money I've got

If I've only got 23,250 left, then I worse off than I would be if I got 100 left Yes but it the relativity of it isn it No Well it is Somebody might say I got a really good job I earn a year

The next person might say, well, that's a small change to me, I earn half a million a year

Yeah, but the bottom line, everybody was going to be better off under the Theresa Mays plan

Everybody, whatever they started with... Yeah, OK, so if Mr Burnham reduces bus fares to £2, that means a lot

I'm confused enough as it is, Michael. Don't bring buses into it

Okay, well, I just thought it might help with an example. But it doesn't help at all

And now I feel bad. I feel like you've rung it. I feel like you're a cat and you've brought me a mouse

And I've said, I don't want your mouse, Mike. Well, you'd meet an awful lot of people when you've got someone close to you living in their care house

I'm sure you do. Most people are happy to pay a proportion of the money, but they need to be supported by the state

That's the absolute holy grail, really, isn't it? Is knowing what is proportionate

But just to make sure I'm not going mad, you acknowledge that Theresa May increased by £75,000

the amount of money that everybody would be left with, regardless of how much they..

Correct. Yes. So what were they cross about? Well, it's the relativity

Is it? Because somebody's lost 90% of their savings. Yeah. Whereas the other persons only lost 20 out of 120, 16% of their pay

Yeah, no, so that's what they objected to, even though they were better off under the previous system

So it doesn't actually make sense what you're saying, but it is a point. Yes

So if, say, the threshold for income tax was reduced by, increased by £1,000

everybody would benefit. The person at the lower end... Would benefit a lot more

Now, I know what relative means, Mike. I'm not a complete flump. Yeah, yeah, OK

Well, it's another example. example? Well, it is and it isn't. So I think you're probably right, but you're also wrong

because they are all better off than they were before, so that doesn't explain why changing it would

have made her so unpopular, because, anyway, it explains why the original system

is... Do you want to know what my favourite ruined abbey in North Yorkshire is

Erm, the island? No, keep guessing. Erm, the one there, erm, there's one there, erm

go on, you tell me. Oh, near where? Near where? Near where? It's not Whitby. Near where

Erm. It's near Helmsley. It's a big county. It is a big county

Near Helmsley. Near Helmsley, yeah. Go on. Oh, Revo Abbey? You're a winner, mate

You got it, mate. Say, I got something right then, anyway. It's a beautiful place

I honestly think my first example is right as well. I think it is right as well, but it doesn't, I mean, Revo Abbey

Can you spell it, mate? Well, I got there eventually. Can you spell it? R-I-E

No. Yes, yes. Yes. Uh, U? No. There's an L in it somewhere

There is an L in it as well. R-I-E-V-A-U-L-X. G-O-A-U-X. LX. OK, thank you

Oh, you're a legend, Mike. Thank you for playing. And he's right. I mean, that is the ultimate call

He's right, but he's wrong. And I'm wrong, but I'm also right. It's 12.03. James O'Brien on LBC

It is six minutes after 12, and you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC

So, I mentioned to you last week that one of my old producers came to visit. which was nice because we're all one big happy family here

on the James O'Brien Experience. I've just got a message from another of my old producers

He says, I've been listening to you grapple with this Theresa May story over the last two hours

He thinks he knows what happened here because he is now a political correspondent

and speaks to a lot of politicians. And he says, my understanding of why her plan failed from speaking to

and then I don't know that I have his permission to list the people that he was speaking to, but trust me

that Boris Johnson couldn't let Theresa May do anything that might have warranted success

And because we were in the middle of the Brexit thing, he was able to scupper the whole thing

He needed to get the public on side against May, and with the help, of course, of his friends at the Daily Mail

and the Daily Telegraph and all the rest of it, he managed to get Theresa May massively undermined

She could never have a fair crack at getting the story in front of the public in a way that would have actually made its benefits apparent

which actually fits better than any of the other explanations that we've had, is that it was a moment of Brexit-related madness

where something that was imperfect but an improvement on what went before

was sold to the British public as a disaster. With a side order of Mike in Ripon

explaining why people don't like the principle, but if you accepted that the tinkering to the principle

actually made people better off than they were... Anyway, there's two hours of your life you're never going to get back again

And it still remains very much one of those subjects about which you know nothing until you need to know everything

Everything. Eight minutes after 12 is the time. So from one generation, although, of course

next time we talk about social care, we should really confine the conversation to people of working age

or fighting age, if you're a racist, to people of working age

because that is 50% of the social care bill and we never talk about that

Is there money to be saved there? I do not know. But one area which is coming under

almost constant scrutiny at the moment is young people in receipts of welfare payments

for mental health issues. And although the numbers are relatively small, they are high enough to merit

at least some of the scrutiny. The Times front page today, I mean, it is the biggest story in the Times

teen anxiety pays more than job, to which if I have trained you well, you will know immediately

that the questions you should be asking will be about how many people are actually affected

how hard is it to get a personal independence payment. If you're really getting it for anxiety

then what sort of hoops will you have been required to jump through? And is it really

just anxiety? Or would this also include depression, autism, ADHD, and various other

debilitating conditions. But, you know, who bothers to do that when you could simply say

a 16-year-old working 12 hours a week is getting less than a teenager pretending to be anxious

Which, of course, there'll be plenty of people queuing up to do. But, listen, you can't..

You can't turn these conversations into a zero-sum game, I don't think

You know, to claim that none of these young people are deserving of the support that they're receiving from the state is obviously a much stupider position to adopt than claiming that they all are

But there will be some who I think trying to identify fraudsters and lead swingers is pretty much a waste of time

because if you create a safety net in a society, there will always be a relatively small

probably negligible number of people who choose to treat the safety net as a trampoline

I remember the first time I came up with that ogy. I thought it was absolutely brilliant

It's all right. It's not great, but it works, right? Here's a safety net

And some people will choose to bounce around in the safety net rather than simply using it as a temporary refuge before they get back up on the tightrope that is life So how nice should the safety net be And should

we reduce the quality of the safety net because some people have chosen to use it as a trampoline

These are questions that are never really wrestled with in newspaper articles based upon a largely

confected accusation that teenagers with anxiety could easily go out to work if only they pulled

their socks up and i don't know at their greens but but there is something here that society is

failing to do some extraordinary detail in the telegraph who report on the same story about the

dutch model about what happens in the netherlands in order to help young people somehow overcome

this inability to get into the workplace. It is, I mean, I read this morning

that children with disabilities are compelled to do things like pick up litter or..

It suddenly had an image, because you hear the word disability, you think physical, I think, still, rather than mental

But, of course, the word applies equally to both. So I don't know whether in the Netherlands

you have young people in, for example, wheelchairs who are required to go around picking up litter

But there's a good piece by the education editor of The Telegraph today looking at the Dutch model

what the Netherlands government has done in order to save young people from worklessness

And I love that phrase because worklessness is not a desirable situation to be in

It's why, in many ways, the people who've chosen to treat the safety net as a trampoline

should be pitied, and they should certainly not be used as a reason to start cutting holes in the safety net

or to claim that everybody else in it is malingering or inauthentic

It's to save young people from worklessness. I don't know if you've got anyone in your life like this

But I do know that if you do, you probably know, in your heart of hearts

that they would much rather not be like this. So I was chatting to a friend the other day

I mentioned this to you. And they were talking about their child

They were talking about their 19-year-old. And they are, if you like, a neat

They're not really doing anything. And they're not, for the record, claiming any benefits either

but that's more a consequence of their parents' financial situation than anything else

They could be, I presume. They'd be entitled to some things. And they do have issues with anxiety

But the phrase that their mum used was that they're frightened of the world

They're frightened of the world. So here are two versions of me, right

Two very real versions of me. One that currently exists and one that used to exist

When I was young, some people carry anxiety and tension in their tummies

Some people carry it in their heads. I don't know where else you could carry it

But for me, anxiety has always been very gastric. It's always been very intestinal

You know when you're sick with nerves. For me, it was a very real reality, a very real thing

And for a long period of my life, I was sick with anxiety

You never would have known it if you'd met me. but I was

and often, forgive me if you're having your lunch at the moment, I won't labour the point

I was often literally sick I would often excuse myself in social situations

particularly when I was a gossip columnist, when I was trying to get into journalism

I would excuse myself I would go to the, and I knew it was happening

and I would be sick and then I would go back and carry on being

the public me, the public version of me the sort of loud and apparently very confident me

I don't know if I was frightened of the world, but that was real

And it stayed in place, actually, to varying degrees. It would come and go

I used to get it a lot when I was asking girls out as well. So it would be going right back to, like, 15, 16 years old

But more so than any of my friends, because people you were close to, you could ask them

say, do you do that? Do you get to go? No, I don't, you weirdo, they would say to me

with great love and affection. So I carried extraordinary levels of anxiety inside me

for much of my life. It was only really when I started therapy that they began to dissipate

An old me would now say, and I did perfectly well, I managed to get out there into the world

I managed to hold down three jobs at the same time, I was measuring inside legs on Regent Street

every Saturday while going out as a gossip columnist every weekday night

trying to get stories that I'd get paid for. I managed to push through, I managed to do this

I managed to be resilient. And that was a real version of me

That person existed. And maybe sometimes it might seem to you I've gone too far the other way now and I have nothing but compassion, empathy and sympathy for young people who describe themselves or who are described by their own parents as being frightened of the world

Frightened of the world. But I honestly think that it is the biggest explainer of what we call needs

I've got absolutely no statistical or evidential basis for that. I've just got a brain and a pair of eyes and, I hope, a warm heart

And I look at these young people, some of whom I may know

some of whom I rely upon your testimony to discover, and I don't believe that they're all sitting around

picking their noses and laughing at taxpayers. I just don't believe it

And I don't believe that they're going to PIP assessments, trying to get money by exaggerating that

I just don't believe it. I could be horribly naive. Some people will be, don't get me wrong

There will always be lead swingers. There will always be safety net bouncers

But I think the biggest explainer, and it will be linked partly to COVID, it will be linked partly to technology

partly to the internet, the smartphone, the constant exposure to things that are too stimulating

and too traumatizing often, and the constant comparisons with others. There's just this constant noise in your head that we did not grow up with

And it has left them frightened of the world. The Dutch disability benefit system provides distinct support for two groups

There are disabled individuals who have worked before and those who have not

If you are in the latter category, and that will be the one where young people are predominant

you used to get financial support about 75 percent of the minimum youth wage but in 2015

they changed and began differentiating this is pre-covid claimants with some capacity to work

and those with no capacity so that their capacity would be determined through an evaluation of their

medical documentation and educational records and if you were found to be fully incapacitated you got the full sum but if you were found to have some capability of working then your income would be reduced accordingly

and and it is if you like and then they introduce things like reciprocal service or counter

performance which just involves sending young people out to litter pick to renovate playgrounds

to serve coffee in a community center or to read to children in schools so it's not a normal paid

job, so you can't sign these people up to provide free labour for a commercial business

or fill a role that someone else is normally paid to do, but

you can essentially ease people into work-like contexts. Work-like contexts. And

what I want you to do next is tell me what you can do to help

a young person who is frightened of the world. And the key word is help

And sometimes we need to remind ourselves that clichés are clichés for a reason

They all contain kernels of truth. Sometimes perhaps you need to be cruel to be kind

I don't know. I'd prefer it to come from experience and I'd prefer the experience to be both current and real

So, you know, my 20-year-old stories of vomiting are not particularly pertinent to this

except to prove that I know what anxiety is, but not at a level that prevented me from working

Maybe it would today. Maybe today I wouldn't feel compelled to push myself

and I don't think it did me any lasting harm, but who the hell knows? How do you stop a young person being frightened of the world

Because that fear of the world is why they're not engaging with education, employment, or training

How do you do it? How did you do it? 03456060973 so at one extreme

you've got old me pushing through regardless and I think doing alright as a consequence

but that's no way to live if I'd had less support or if I'd been less ambitious or less arrogant

if I hadn't been to the kind of school that I'd been to maybe I'd have fallen off the horse

maybe I'd have fallen by the wayside because my fear of the world would have been

too much to bear but that's what public schools are designed to do

They're designed to make you outwardly confident, but inwardly vulnerable and broken often

Let's look at Boris Johnson. But that's what they are designed to do

So if I hadn't gone to a school like that, maybe my fear of the world would have crippled me

What do you do now for this generation of young people? How do you stop them being frightened of the world

0345 6060 973. because it's in all our interests to find answers to this

And I don't think you need to be the king of woke

to realize that the answer is unlikely to be screaming at these people and maligning them and insulting them

and further impoverishing them and calling them names and reminding them how... You get the picture

How do you help a young person who is frightened of the world

and is there anything society can do about it as opposed to family, loved ones

and support structures it's 12.22 it's such a weird word as well anxiety

if you were to go for a PIP assessment and you were to be approved

which is vanishingly rare not that you'd know it from much of the coverage today

then the sort of things you would need to prove would include an inability to perform daily tasks

So imagine being so anxious that you can't cook or wash or eat or dress

Social engagement would cause a panic attack, major distress around other people

And the proof you have to provide would have to come from your GP or your mental health worker

And it wouldn't be enough to simply turn up. Do you know this

Do you think most of the people you hear on your radio talking about young people with anxiety know this

Do they bother even to do the most cursory research? You can't just turn up with a diagnosis and say, oh, thank you very much, that's £194

You have to provide a letter from your GP or your mental health worker

And if you've got a mental health worker in this country at this time, you are ill

And that would describe the specific everyday limits on your ability to do things, not just your diagnosis

You'd have to provide really clear examples of what happens on your worst days, including how often you experience panic attacks

Now, the average employer, if they know that you are subject to panic attacks and you won't know on what days they're going to happen

is unlikely to favour you when looking for an employee over somebody who is only going to take time off work with more obvious and visible conditions, which will be very rare

I have a panic attack twice a month. I don't know what days it's going to be on. Let's just hope that we're not busy in the shop on the days that I have

Do you see what I mean? But the key bit here, agoraphobia is anxiety

Severe panic attacks are consequences of anxiety. The people getting personal independence payments for anxiety

have to prove incredibly debilitating conditions that are not really even comparable to me being sick at work

it's not even i wouldn't get it regularly vomiting because i can come out sorry to labor this point

but i i think it's i think it's relevant so that level of anxiety is what gets you pip but pip

isn't even one in ten of the people that are in this category of a million i i'm not suggesting

for a minute that we can fix people with medical grade anxiety by changing the way we do things or

making them pick up litter. I want to be clear about that. But nine out of ten young people not

in education, employment or training are not qualifying for any benefits, any disability

benefits, any personal independence payments or more probably. And this phrase that's haunting me

at the moment, scared of the world, how do we fix that? Together. How do we fix that together

0345 6060 973 is the number you need. It's 1226. Martin's in Southampton

Martin, what would you like to say? Well, I'd just like to kind of come at this from a

sort of parallel direction. My younger sister, about a decade younger than me

and my best friend both suffer from anxiety and they're both gender diverse

so my sister's got ADHD, My best friend has ASD. And in sort of completely separately, I'm quite privileged position that I was able to employ both of them

And in doing so, was able to offer a sort of a level of flexibility and not really demanding anything from them

but giving them the space to do something that you really wouldn't get. and sort of going somewhere between volunteering and benefits and employment in a sort of..

A bit of a grey area, but what I found was, in both instances, I almost offered too much flexibility

and both naturally started asking for deadlines, and asking to do more

So this is real commercial work, it's not just sort of side stuff

But they were, yeah, both of them did a lot better with that kind of ability to, if they weren't feeling up to it

I wasn't, you know, if they needed a day off, they didn't have to ask. You're a man after my own heart

Because, I mean, you're right to acknowledge that not all employers would be in a position to do this

And you're obviously motivated by your love of your best friend and your sister to do things that you wouldn't have done for potential employees that you didn't love or that you didn't have a previous connection with

But it's almost like breaking the seal, isn't it? It's almost like breaking the cycle

And once you have helped them break it, they actually start progressing independently

Yeah, and I think, well, especially with my, in fact, with both of them, but my sister was very much kind of reliant on my parents, and they were supporting her, you know, very admirably, and it was completely necessary

But I think what has happened as a result of essentially being able to offer her that and give her that opportunity, she's sort of standing far more on her own

And I don't want to kind of sound like the... You don't. You sound lovely

You know what I mean? I don't want to be saying, oh, it's sort of tough love or anything like that

You mean a Victorian. You don't want to sound like a Victorian workhouse manager. Exactly

But it's not tough love. It's the opposite of tough love. So, you know, here are 20 working days in a calendar month or 23 working days in a calendar month

And there may be three, five on which they can't work, but they can be incredibly productive on the other days

The problem is that we still have Victorian models of employment. and there's no real way short of a visionary employer like you

There's no real way of, and I've got, I'm not criticizing anybody else because it would be almost impossible in many lines of work

not to know exactly how many bodies you're going to have in work every day

You've got appointments in the book for haircuts. You've got, you know, a fixed number of customers coming through the door

You've got X number of deliveries to make. You've got paperwork to do

You need to know who's going to be there to do it to make sense of your own schedule and your own future

But something needs to change. something needs to change and it's not

I think the issue that I have with the current way and again I'm not demonising

anyone in receipt of any kind of social support but the way that

it's currently structured you are simply sort of paying people to exist and then

saying we'll offload this problem till later and hope it gets better on its own

which it won't but this is what they say the problem is it's not how it reaches the ears of the public

they literally say it's not good enough just to give these people a check if they qualify if they apply you know

there'll be plenty of people who don't it's not good enough to do that we have to be helping them

out of the situation that the money is designed to support them in and they're not doing that the

problem is largely as a consequence of the kind of journalism that is in every newspaper pretty

much this morning that the public think that there is this sort of cohort of young people who are

choosing to live lives of indolence and inactivity when they would love nothing more than an

opportunity like the one you provided to your sister and your best friend briefly because i'm

late for the news tell me about the change you saw in in either one of them well neither so i

mean if i go my best friend for a minute so i've kind of gone to my sister most of that but

he he really wasn't going out he wasn't doing anything in like he wasn't moving on with his

life or sort of you know trying to get on um with building a house with building or you know rental

or anything just moving on with himself and then sort of it has effectively and it's not me it's

him has driven forward that oh actually i'd quite like to start living now um and then the sort of

the the spark and that was it you know i i haven't done the thing i i just put the sort of kindling

there briefly and everything else from the spark to the to the fuel has been him doing that i see

Yeah, I'm a naive old soul. I think that that would be a benefit to huge numbers of these people

This one million strong cohort, I honestly think it's a relatively small..

I mean, it's a big deal, but it's also small, you see, what Martin's done

It's not like world-changing, but it was enough to change his friend's world

And that's what I mean by... I may be frightened of the world is the wrong phrase

but I can't currently think of a better one. How do you help these young people into the world

because once you've helped them into it, then, you know, a bit like a child on stabilizers

When you take the stabilizers off and they don't, they'll be off, they'll be gone. They'll be able to pedal themselves

but they just need a little bit of help in the first instance, and I don't know what that help looks like

I've got the results of Bob. They are in. Bob, if you're just joining us

is the Burnham Optimism Barometer. And every Monday, moving forward, we're going to take a quick test of your feelings

about how optimistic you are regarding Andy Burnham. And the first results are in

I'll bring them to you live on LBC after the headlines with Amelia Cox

James O'Brien on LBC. It's 12.35 and you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC

I mean, the Dutch model is sort of... It's not quite compulsory volunteering

but the amount of support you will receive from the state if you're an unemployed young person in the Netherlands

with a disability will change according to your work capability. And if you have a certain level of capability to work

then you will receive more if you undertake reciprocal service or counter-performance

So these are roles that do not replace normal paid jobs, which means that the local council or the municipality

can't um kind of get get free labor which is always a danger with some of these schemes

and neither can a commercial business just sort of get unpaid labor as part of a helping young

people back to work scheme and you can't do anything that somebody else is normally paid

to do and it seems to be successful it seems to work um there was a study published in 2022

that reported higher employment rates among the young people, young disabled people, who had done this than were reported previously

So you are allowed to ask claimants to take part in unpaid, socially useful work

And the idea is as Andy Burnham reportedly looks at the Dutch model when addressing the issue of NEETS in this country that it just breaks the seal it breaks the cycle

it changes the relationship. And I passionately believe, and I don't use the word passionately that often

I passionately believe that that is what a huge number of young people need

They just need a little bit of help. They just need someone holding the back of the bicycle

when the stabilisers have come off. So you reach adulthood, You reach 18, right

You've had stabilizers on your bicycle all your life. I never thought of it like this before, but I think it works

We'll soon find out if it doesn't. So you've been peddling away since school, but you've had stabilizers on

There's structure to your life. There's purpose to your life. Whether you like school or not

you know that you're supposed to be there and you have a fairly clear idea of what you're supposed to do when you are there

COVID probably broke a stabilizers, actually, and then they got stuck back on again

when we came out of lockdown and we came out of Covid. Stabilisers are there and then suddenly the stabilisers are taken off

What happens if you take stabilisers off bicycles that people are pedalling

without them being ready for the stabilisers to be taken off? Oh, you don't need me to tell you

but I will anyway. Then you fall off your bike. And you are less likely to get back on it

than you were before you fell off it. So what do you need? You just need somebody to hold you

for the first few pedals without stabilizers, and then you're off, you're golden, you're away

I like this ogy. You're perfectly entitled not to. Robin's in Murfield in West Yorkshire

Robin, what made you pick up the phone? Hi there, James. We've spoken before

I'm the Drystone Waller in Gardner. Happy days, yes. I indeed had a bit of a dodgy mental health time

And I speak from experience because I still have it. It is a scary place out there

And we are all scared a little bit, but we all put up a little facade to deal with it

And I would say, I remember learning from when I had group therapy, because I have borderline personality disorder amongst the joys of anxiety and depression

And I remember being told something because one of the things with BPD is that you experience very strong emotions and anxiety and fear and things

and sometimes what you can do is it's it's it's essentially the thing of doing take it till you

make it because you have that that worry that adrenaline kick bolstering up the uh the anxiety

and as much as your brain is a fantastic unfathomable um sort of powerhouse of what

it can do for you it can also be fairly stupid and be duped so if you say oh i'm i'm scared to

go out, I'm scared to go out, and I have that. I have agoraphobia, which is a little bit

sometimes tough to deal with when you have to work outside. You picked a job, didn't you, Robin

Oh, indeed. Indeed. But, you know, always good to challenge yourself. Indeed. Yeah, well, it is

actually. I agree with that. And sometimes you can just go, okay, my body

is telling me that I'm anxious, but I'm going to say that, actually, I'm excited

This adrenaline, I'm going to use it for excitement. I'm excited because yeah, I'm going somewhere which

where I've never been to, I'm driving to down a route, I'm not used to, I'm talking to someone

who I might be a bit scared of, I don't know what they're going to be like

because I struggle up with social situations. But try and flip it and go, I'm not scared, I'm excited

I'm excited that I'm going to be learning something new. I'm going to be going out there

I'm going to be talking to somebody new, making a new connection, helping them with their work

How much easier to do that with a little bit of help and guidance

rather than having to generate this almost a diagnosis, isn't it? And a treatment program independently and alone

Oh, definitely. Have the support. And I think it just, all it takes is just

because we're all scared of something. Whether it's something out in the world

you know, there's plenty out there to be scared of. Yes. The economy, every little bit

And I think sometimes we just have to realize that we're not always this facade that we put on

I used to say, I haven't been asked for a while, probably for very good reason to speak to young people and i always used to say what's the best

bit of advice you can give us one one bit of advice and i'd say everybody else is frightened

too everybody else is and the ones that aren't are sociopaths but everybody is frightened it's just

it's just the question of how you deal with it and we're not helping young people deal with it

at the moment and and the more they deal with it the less frightened they become and the more

productive they become and the happier they become yeah and i think this dutch model is a is a good

idea in regards to just giving them that little boost that they

just by going out and helping someone, reading to someone you know, the hardest thing

when you have, say for instance agoraphobia, is of course going outside, you think, oh everything

it's so scary, I can't do it, I can't do it, so just

do, break it down into little chunks you know, you don't eat an elephant

in one bite, you eat it one bite at a time well I mean just for the avoidance of doubt

nobody should be eating elephants at all I just want to be clear I don't want this program

to get a reputation for encouraging the consumption of endangered species but

I mean I don't know if it's probably an unfashionable word or there'll be

debate in the therapeutic community about the value of it or the language that should be used but

aversion therapy do the thing that frightens you in very very small doses

and it becomes less frightening all the time. So there's a lot that can be done to help these people

And probably shouting at them and calling them lazy is not on that list, Robin

No, you will do the opposite. And I remember my social worker, my therapist and things

saying, just put your shoes on and then see how you feel walking about in them

Because when you're in slippers and in slacks, you don't want to do anything. But if you've got your walking shoes on, you've got a purpose

and that will be a bit like with the Dutch model. I think if you give, you know

they put on their shoes on, they say like, oh, I'm just going to, you know, to help

just do a bit of reading, you know, break it down. Don't make it feel like I'm going out to the big world

I'm, you know, I'm going places I don't know with people I haven't seen before saying, I'm just going to go and read

That's all. Yeah, and you go home with a spring in your step that night

that day, because you've actually done something. Because the thing that's always missing from these conversations

I'm so glad you were listening today, is how the young people feel about feeling the way that they feel, just to get all the

feels into a single sentence. They are not sitting there congratulating themselves on

gaming the system or avoiding the nine to five, you know. They're sitting there feeling

either nothing which I think is quite common or feeling worse about the fact that they not doing anything than most people can imagine And that would be one way of doing it

So it doesn't really matter what it is. It's just doing something. That's why I use the phrase breaking the cycle

Robin, thank you. And thank you for acknowledging, as everyone is doing on the programme today

whether we're talking about social care for the elderly and people with dementia

or whether we're talking about the necessity of helping young people into the workspace

just acknowledging serendipity. I'm lucky to have access to these services. I'm not lucky to have these conditions

but luckier than people who've got the conditions and not the support. That's all we're really talking about

Stabilisers. You take off the stabilisers and the child needs help. And at the moment they don't get any help

or they're getting next to no help. And even if they're getting money, this is the bit that's missing from the political discourse

even if they're getting money, they're not getting help. And there will, look, of course there are going to be lead swingers

Let me just read you a few texts that really sum up the complexity of the conversation

And I've got no beef with any of these texters, but let me read them in order

Anthony, this man is so right, and it's how I treat my eight-year-old son

who I think has ADHD. If I cut him some slack, he does much better. Put pressure on him and he shuts down

He will even expend more energy rebelling. David writes, I agree with most things you say

but I literally have people in my family who are claiming pip for anxiety

who are openly, to us, faking it because they don't want to work

It's not that difficult if you're willing to lie, lie and lie again

So the idea that people aren't swinging the lead is obviously false. Nobody said that there aren't any people swinging the lead

just that A, things are not going to be as widespread as we are encouraged to believe

and B, it may even be a little bit more complicated than it looks from the outside

But lead swingers exist. Of course they do. What you don't do is use the existence of a lead swinger to treat everybody like a fraudster

Not least because of what Andy writes. PIP is not just given out, James. I don't get it

And I'm currently awaiting a below-the-knee amputation. I know many who've had legs amputated who do not qualify

PIP, personal independence payments, are not what the shouty rights say that they are

And just another one on the issue of anxiety. I have to tune out of the show now as I'm about to jump onto an online support group

But thank you for the way you're demonstrating the difficulties surrounding obtaining a PIP award for anxiety disorders

And I think disorder is the operative word. I'm 35 and anxiety has ruined and taken control of my life in precisely the ways you are talking about

Thank you for advocating for those without a voice in the way that you do. Thank you. That's very kind of you, Noel

But just to take Noel and David alongside each other. Just because your relative is gaming the system doesn't mean that Noel is

So what role society plays here is to acknowledge and ideally root out the fraudsters

if the problem is significant, which most people in the sector doubt, but not all

But you can't use the existence of a fraudster to malign everybody who is suffering

In fact, what does it even achieve? What does pointing out a fraudster even achieve

in the context of the genuine recipients? 12.47 is the time. My crack team of statisticians have been pouring over the data

that came pouring into the studio earlier today when we were launching the Bob, the Burnham Optimism Barometer

and the scientific calculations that they've undertaken, Keith got his abacus out, they've been toiling away

since 10.15, well, we finished it at 10 past 10, didn't we

10 past 10 was the cutoff point. Everybody texted in a number between 1 and 10

to describe how optimistic they feel about Andy Burnham. And I will reveal to you immediately after this

the first entry into the... Oh, I'm going to call it the Job Bob

It's the first entry into the James O'Brien Burnham Optimism Barometer. The Job Bob. The Jobber Bob

and I will reveal to you the first score. How optimistic do you think the audience

listening to this programme is about Andy Burnham right now? Find out after this

James O'Brien on LBC. It is 12.51. You are listening to James O'Brien on LBC

And here it is. The first result on the... Do we prefer Bob or Job Bob

Job Bob? Job Bob? The J-O-B Burnham Optimism Barometer? You just prefer it as Bob

We're over-complicating the issue. Are we? I'm not doing a text vote on that

Don't worry. There's a chance Eleanor's just made this number up. I'm not going to lie to you

because I was obviously getting a little bit stroppy about the fact that if it was Emily Maitlis

they'd probably have a massive computer in the studio now and five permanent members of staff crunching the numbers

If the news agents had asked for a Burnham Optimism barometer, it would probably be in Leicester Square at the moment

and about 50 feet high, with dancing girls and confetti guns. But, you know, on the little old J.O.B. show

on the James O'Brien show, you just get a couple of rubber bands and an old toilet roll

But anyway, here it is. Twang! Twang! Just twanging the rubber bands for comic effect

The first figure. So, earlier today, I asked an unscientific sample of residents of the United Kingdom

to send in their optimism score regarding Andy Burnham's premiership on a scale of one to ten

Millions of you. That's a slight exaggeration. Thousands. Thousands, Martha? Thousands or hundreds

Tens. Several. Many of you, many of you texted in. Some of you texted in

And we have collated the figures and crunched them according to a sophisticated scientific formula

And the very first figure on the Burnham Optimism Barometer is... I was hoping there might be some music, Keith, or something

No? That sounds worse than nothing, right? See, again, if it was a newsagent

they'd have an orchestra. There'd be an orchestra in the studio at the moment. Eight

the figure is eight the optimism surrounding andy burnham's premiership among people who can be

bothered to respond to my plea is currently eight out of ten now you know what you thinking i know what you thinking do you know what i thinking you thinking Will he remember to do it next week And there only one way to find out

Anyway, back to the conversation in hand. Dave's in Lambeth. Dave, what would you like to say

Hi, James, how are you doing? I'm all right, Dave. How are you doing? Yeah, not so bad

I'm just, like, sort of tuning into your talk-in today, and I just thought I'd give you a little bit of our experience

and what we've been through over the past six or seven years, actually. Yeah. on this thing. So really, my son, he left school during the pandemic with, obviously

in the way that kids left school during the pandemic, there was no big sort of goodbye or

anything overnight. All of his friends that he hung out with, he didn't see him say goodbye

Tough. Really tough. Really tough. All of this happened. He hasn't been able to get himself into work for the past sort of six years

but it's not really him not being able to. It's the fact that he's obviously got issues

with going to work and being out there and all that sort of stuff. What sort of issues

What do you mean? Well, he's anxious. He doesn't like authority. He prefers to be at home in this room

playing PlayStation. We've evicted him from the house a few times but he's come back

He doesn't really particularly want to work or do anything. So just to give a summary of where we are at the moment

I gave him a letter a couple of months ago to say he needs to be in education and training or in employment

or he needs to go to the doctor who needs to provide him something

to tell us why he won't work and why he won't go out of the house. He sounds depressed to an amateur, doesn't he

I mean, to me at least. Yeah, he's clearly depressed. He's bleedy depressed, but this is the bigger problem of it

Of course it is. So when you've got young people and you know that they've got depression

and they're your son and your family, you've got really no help from anybody in authority whatsoever

in the sense that I can't force him to go to the doctor

I can't force him to go and seek help, even though we've desperately tried to

We've dragged him to counselling. We've done all sorts of things, everything that we possibly can to try and get him there

But, you know, he's got to want to do it himself. Yeah, with this type of depression comes aggression

It also comes, you know, total ignorance or ignorance of us and lack of respect, et cetera, and blah, blah, blah

And we've got this person living in our house who doesn't want to be in our house

but doesn't want to go anywhere else, doesn't want to go out to work, doesn't want to go to training

doesn't want to do anything quite happy playing in his playstation. Going out with his mates in the evening

he still finds money for that, funnily enough, but, you know, this is where we're at

and we're supposed to say that we love our son and we support him

This is unsustainable. It's unsustainable. And it's horrible for you as well

I hope you're finding time to look after yourself as well because this is like a subversion

of the natural order of things. This isn't where a parent is supposed to be in relation to their child

We've got younger kids that we want to have a good example

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. but the problem is we can't get him any help

Okay? The society is not set up to help. Especially with the way you apply for jobs these days

Every job is applied for online. You don't get to speak to people up front

There's that exchange of finding out about their lives. What does he want

I mean, if you got him in a vulnerable moment. Because he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life playing PlayStation

even if there are moments when he thinks he does. He obviously doesn't. I don't think he really knows what he wants, if I'm honest

But the problem is, is that there's nobody out there that will face him

even if he went to that, oh, look, I want this type of job, or I want him to do that

The answer is, is apply online. Yeah. So you're never going to have that conversation

to find out about a person's character, about their aspirations, about anything about him these days

because everything is about applying for online. And as an employer myself, if I put a job out there

I get hundreds of things from all around the country, even all around the world, okay

And all they are, they're faceless things. But I only find out about people if I speak to them

I understand that. And he, I mean, in the first instance, he just needs to sit in a room with people, doesn't he

Who are in a similar situation and there's someone in front of the room who is telling them what they can and can't do

what would help. You must be frightened, Dave. You must be, because you're thinking, what's he going to be like when he's 50

Well, this is what we ask him. And this is what I say to him. I often have tried to have conversations, attempt to have conversations about it

about where the decision's going. You know, you're closer now to 30 almost than you were to sort of 16

Mathematics are a bit off there. But essentially, you know, that's where we're heading to

And there is a point where you think, suddenly the pain is going to drop

Suddenly. You know, even I've asked him, go and do some volunteer work somewhere

Anything, anything. But it's, this is, I think this is where we're living in the next days

Well, he's a fairly severe example of something that is a lot more commonplace than a lot of people acknowledge

Do you, because asthma's here now. I'm sorry I can't be more help. I'm sorry we can't talk for longer

but are there times when you think he's just the lazy so-and-so? Yes

Yeah, I bet there are. And then my wife, and it's the biggest point of argument in the house

with my wife and myself, because we don't know how to handle it

We really don't. You've only got the vocabulary of your own experiences

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, lots of people suggesting it sounds like he's traumatised, he's depressed

but equally all of those things can improve, you just want to see something in his own eyes

that suggests to you that he wants to improve. And that as a dad, dad to dad, that must be awful, mate

And I'm feeling your pain, actually, and what you're going through. And I know you're doing your best, and there's nothing more depressing

than doing your best as a parent and not seeing any benefit

or any result from it, worrying that even your best isn't good enough. But you're not alone for what that's worth. Thank you

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James O'Brien on LBC