To think the main Mumsnet demographic are out of touch politically

[Veiledveritas]

Reform.are smashing the polls yet any Reform voter is despised and ridiculed on here.

I personally am an anarchist but it'll be a cold day in hell before I ever am nice to someone who supports a party who suggested restricted abortion access and increasing taxes on people (by which they mean women) who don't have children.

I'd love to know who runs those programmes, whatever they are. LA or Reform mates?
An individual gets to use their allocated money as they please. A programme, not so much.

Well come on we all know council tax is just a social care tax now and their legal duties vastly outstrip their means, at all our expense

Odd, my council tax pays for the police, fire service, roads, libraries (the few that are left), refuse collection. Just about the only thing I don’t get in exchange for it is social care.

Ours doesn't seem to do that! The main road in to our village has a "failed road surface sign" and although we do have a bin service, there is no library or anything else really. So, yes, we pay for social care.

Council tax should be used first and foremost on things like refuse collection, maintaining the roads, etc. "Social care" needs to be placed on the back burner and families need to take on more of a reponsibility in caring for family members, not to mention parenting their children (that they CHOSE to have!) and raising them to become fully-functioning, tax-paying members of society instead of video game playing shut-ins or drug taking criminals.

What back burner? Where is the back burner that means people can be left in their own shit and unable to feed themselves?

What on earth makes you think that all families live near each other to do all the care-giving?

Oh. It's you.

‘The few that are left’

Same - library closed, road surfaces awful, bin collections reduced, everything needs re spraying, bins regularly not emptied and instead boarded up. There are however several school taxis for individual children which leave every day from 1 road.

There will be more jobs than people as AI kicks in even more. Besides that what’s the alternative? Each generation below is bigger and population is always going up?

More people than jobs you mean?

Oh yeh good catch thanks

Have a 30 second think about why disabled children might need an "individual taxi" instead of sharing. Engaging your brain for a short period will save you time in the long run.

That doesn't answer my question to the pp.

No, people will step in, there will be an surplus needing jobs or people will do it at home.

And your answer to the alternative? Population increase always?

Schools especially SEN ones used to have their own mini buses and cars. It was easier for County to outsource to taxi’s then maintain a fleet.
The rapid rise in alternative provision providers with LA paying for taxi’s needs new thinking.

Let's not start picking hairs or being sarcastic and rude, the school taxi costs are a genuine issue.

I'll bet I'm not alone in seeing a taxi pick up a child, actually a child of friends and neighbours to drive her to mainstream school every day. She was mildly affected by cerebral palsy, fully able to walk and talk.

One of her parents drove to work every day passing close by her school, the other worked normal office hours from home and could have taken her.

Multiply that by all over the country and it's costing a lot of money.

Yes, why might it not be appropriate for all children to share a minibus? Fortunately things have moved on since disabled children were all lumped together as one amorphous blob although not everyone has kept up with that, I do appreciate.
(In my experience cabs are still often shared between several children but what do I know? I don't stand outside in the morning with my clipboard, checking to see who's doing what.)

No tone policing from you thanks. Incidentally, do you have a disabled child attending a SEN school?

It's not as clear cut as that

what has happened is that the robots are taking up a lot of staff time in needing to be maintained because they break a lot but more than that, after the initial novelty value wears off, the older people get bored and some actively dislike them. Now you could say, well that's just tough titty they'll have to lump it but I'd rather older people who need care aren't forced to get it from a robot because there's no other option

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wdzyyglq5o

73% of people who voted didn't vote for reform. So there are a lot more people who don't align with them than do, I think Mumsnet is fairly similar in representation tbh.

What about the large and growing numbers of older people who don't have any adult children to do this caring? Shall we just leave them to rot then?

No I don't but I have two sets of friends whose daughters are both at the same one who happen to be close neighbours and share a taxi there as it is in a diffeent town.

Your question is irrelevant in any case. We aren't talking about you and your SEN child and your SEN child's need for a taxi.

We are talking about a ballooning use of taxis for a ballooning number of children with SEN diagnoses and looking at whether that money is being wisely spent, which in some cases, not yours, it isn't.

I was trying to understand what the pp meant by their post, and your comments did not help to illuminate that.

Part of the long term solution surely has to lie in public health initiatives which enable people to live healthy lives for much longer, which would reduce the need for care in any case.

Healthy life expectancy has fallen in the UK in recent years, and there is a massive gap between healthy life expectancy for the wealthiest and the most deprived. Tackling some of those health inequalities would save the state a huge amount of money in the longer term, reduce the pressure on social care and enhance people's quality of life significantly.

I haven't seen any policies from Reform seeking to tackle health inequalities despite the fact that healthy life expectancy is much shorter in many of the areas where Reform is popular.