Thank you for contacting me about Alzheimer’s and dementia.
I believe that increasing public awareness and understanding of dementia among the wider public is vital to ensure that people are supported to live well with the condition.
Research is crucial to understanding and tackling dementia. Under the Challenge on Dementia 2020 strategy, the Government's commitment to spend over £300 million on dementia research between 2015 and 2020 was met a year early, with £341 million being spent by March 2019. The Government is also supporting the £79 million Accelerating Detection of Disease challenge, a project bringing together the NHS, industry and leading charities to support research into the early diagnosis of disease, including dementia.
The Government remains committed to research to combat dementia and will shortly lay out plans for supporting people with dementia in England up to 2025. I am glad that the Spending Review 2021 guaranteed £5 billion of investment for health-related research and development.
The Government is committed to taking the difficult decisions and tackling these problems head on, creating a sustainable adult care system that is fit for the future. The Spending Review 2021 guarantees an extra £44 billion will be invested in the Department of Health and Social Care over the length of this Parliament, which is equivalent to a real-terms growth rate of 4.1 per cent. In September the Government confirmed £5.4 billion for adult social care over the next three years and the Spending Review confirmed that £3.6 billion will go directly to local government to implement the cap on personal care costs with £1.7 billion over three years to improve the wider social care system.
Thank you again for taking the time to contact me.