The world is, thankfully, full of temptations and the latest to face the Labour party has the label ‘long-term care’ attached to it. The particular form of care reform now on offer must be resisted by Labour.

Partly on the simple grounds that it does nothing to help today’s weakest and most frail citizens. No MP can be under any illusion that now, compared with only a few years ago, the most vulnerable get a worse deal. Budgets are more tightly controlled, if not cut, and yet the numbers of constituents urgently needing help is growing.

The proposal under discussion comes from the Dilnot report on the financing of long-term care. This report seems to have an overall goal that limits the cost of care to those of us lucky or prudent enough to acquire enough assets during yesteryear. A lifetime cost of social care should be capped at £35,000 and the savings people in residential homes are allowed to have before they pay for their care will be quadrupled to £100,000.

No one, in an ideal world, would be against these proposals. But we are unlikely to inhabit again the world we have just lost for many a decade.

Birkenhead is part of the Wirral. This four-constituency local authority has a £400m budget from which £100m has to be cut over the next three years. A large part of today’s budget is ringfenced for education. The budgets for community and long-term care, together with that covering the protection of children, is not ringfenced. These Wirral budgets are already well overspent and the savings have to come from somewhere.

Some months ago I separately asked three heads in challenging areas what percentage of families using their school would they not wish as a child to be a part of. ‘Forty per cent’, came the replies. What proportion of the children at their schools should be in care today, I asked? ’Twenty per cent’, were the replies.

So let us do more than pity those social workers who have to decide between who gets long-term care and which vulnerable child, that might be battered to death, gets whisked away into care.

So the question is how do we pay for more care with a very vulnerable frail elderly, and others who suffer major disabilities? And how do we best save that growing number of children who find themselves in a cruel jungle that is passed off as their home?

With these choices that have to be made by councillors and officials, how can any government seriously consider as a priority spending an extra £1.7bn on helping pensioners pass on nifty sums of capital to their children?

Labour must resist entering into an electoral auction. If, by some miracle, huge additional sums of money are available, Labour must campaign for a clear alternative package. Aneurin Bevan remarked that priorities are the language of socialism. Surely our priorities must go in saving children who might otherwise be so brutalised that some will die, and to those pensioners, and others with severe handicaps, whose daily misery could be somewhat abated if only there was more cash.

Labour must resist falling into the Dilnot trap, no matter how tempting.

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Frank Field is MP for Birkenhead and former minister for welfare reform