Gunboats to Jersey on election day? Nothing better illuminates the Gilbert and Sullivan-esque style of our prime minister. But, despite stunts, these were local elections in England, where most services are – or aren’t – delivered. From bins to parks, potholes to police, for safe or squalid surroundings, most quality-of-life services are controlled locally, not at Westminster – and by far the biggest is social care, eating up more than half of councils’ budgets. Yet care is invisible to most voters. When families do suddenly encounter it – frantic parents of a child with special needs, or a family needing care for a parent with dementia – they are shocked to find a threadbare postcode lottery of erratic services. Many voters who cast ballots on Thursday know virtually nothing about social care, blindly assuming it’s like the NHS, until they need it – and most won’t. That’s why no dedicated plan for social care in England – it’s a devolved responsibility – will feature in the Queen’s speech next Tuesday. Yet again the government calculates that not enough voters benefit to be worth spending the many billions it would take to put this right. Expect the Queen to make yet another breezy promise of a white paper: the Future Social Care Coalition, comprising every interested body, was dismayed to receive a letter from the chief secretary to the Treasury telling them he would “bring forward proposals for reform next year” – or some time never, more likely. If Johnson bestrides the political scene, he can forget his Downing Street podium promise to “fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared”. Plans were bouncing to and fro in Downing Street until last month, but the chancellor’s austerity won out: the Telegraph reports that the Treasury hopes to “kill the whole thing altogether”. Expect this to be the dismal pattern for most post-Covid spending. Besides, the only plan that interested Johnson was a pledge that no one should lose their home to pay for care costs. But the immediate emergency is less loss of inheritances than lack of any care at all: last year Age UK reported 2,000 frail, old people a day had been refused care when asking for help during the previous year. Care ranges from highly profitable top-end homes owned by hedge funds in tax havens to small family businesses going bust as fees for state-funded care are too low. Care workers’ abysmal pay means there are 100,000 vacancies. But only the lost inheritances concern the Conservatives, ever since David Cameron commissioned a report back in 2011 from Andrew Dilnot – he recommended limiting to £35,000 what people in England should pay before the state picked up the bill. But that would only subsidise rather than solve the problem of cost: Dilnot was not asked how to find the funds to repair the service itself. The law was passed, but never enacted, costing too many billions for George Osborne’s austerity. There’s almost something comical, if it weren’t tragic, about this government’s social policy ignorance. The story is that when the NHS was recently asked to model the effect of implementing Dilnot, this “levelling up” government was dismayed to find the 200,000 families a year that would benefit most would be those in the top wealth quintile living in the south-east. It didn’t take a genius to work that out. No wonder the government has no plan for all the contradictions implied by “levelling up”. Don’t hold your breath for genuine social care reform. Expect only bungs to stop councils collapsing under the strain in this autumn’s comprehensive spending review. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the last budget delivered 8% cuts to most departments: councils yet again will be forced to wield the Treasury’s axe. Here’s why this government – like others – will never produce a comprehensive social care plan: for them, every option is a political or financial stinker. Make everyone pay more tax? That means the property-less young subsidising the property-rich old. Make the old with funds pay a lump sum or a lien on their home on retirement? They damned that as a “death tax”. Make everyone – or just the over-40s – pay care insurance? Earnings are already stagnant. They could create a national care service, putting councils back in charge of the chaotic array of agencies and care homes outsourced under Margaret Thatcher, but that’s a huge re-nationalisation. None of these look compelling when Ipsos Mori shows care remains low in public concerns. In the coming austerity, why not keep those billions for eye-catchers with more political bang for the buck? On Queen’s speech day, look to see if Matt Hancock, the health secretary, is still sporting his “care” badge. The speech is expected to include a bill to try to recover a united NHS from the chaos caused by Andrew Lansley’s 2012 Act, which blew it into fragments. The bill’s architect, the departing Simon Stevens, head of NHS England, is trying to obliterate competition and tendering to create an integrated care system everywhere to combine hospitals, GPs, community services – and social care. But the bill will not legally bind in councils; without a social care plan, that’s impossible, so that jeopardises the whole idea. In name only is Matt Hancock in charge of the Department of Health and Social Care. In practice, the two will stay as divided as ever, until some government some time is brave enough to grasp the nettle.