Many people across Tatton will be waiting anxiously for credible, workable solutions to be proposed. Politicians should get on and sort out problems, not just talk about them, endlessly.

Having spent a career managing, or working with, residential, day care, and domiciliary services, I recognise the challenge: if it was easy to solve, Governments would have done so a long time ago. However, now is the time to say: ‘No more excuses”.

My own view is that the necessary strategy for the future of social care needs to start with the following actions:

• appoint a senior Minister to be responsible specifically for social care
• change attitudes to the status of the social care profession, putting it on equal footing to health
• delete from all immigration legislation and policies the offensive description of social care workers as “unskilled”
• invest in training
• resist turning social care into a national service, instead strengthening the role and capacity of local government to deliver and commission high quality services
• make all personal care free
• fund other social care from a fair balance between progressive taxation and capped individual contributions