All of us worry about the future. We make plans for ourselves, investing in pensions to see us through retirement, we plan for our children and how they will be looked after.

But more and more we worry about our parents, we worry about what happens when they fall ill or start to struggle. Will they get proper care? Will someone be there to give them a helping hand? What will it cost to get them into a good care home?

Thanks to advances in medical science, on average people are now living longer. That is a brilliant thing, it means more time to enjoy our retirement and more time to spend with people that we love.

But it also brings new challenges for our society to adapt to. This week the Office for National Statistics revealed that dementia had become the most common cause of death for adults in the UK, overtaking heart disease for the first time ever.

People who have lost relatives to this cruellest of diseases will know the burden that it places on relatives and services as our loved ones slowly deteriorate and need more support.

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Old age is something we all have in common. None of us can hold back time or stay immune from the impact that the weight of years will have on our health. That means all of us have an interest in making sure we have the kind of social infrastructure that can look after us in old age.

That means funding proper pensions and the winter fuel allowance that keep pensioners out of poverty. It means a properly resources NHS. And it also means a social care system that is up to the job.

Of all of these it is social care that is often people’s biggest cause of concern. We all want our relatives, and eventually ourselves, to be looked after with dignity in their own home where possible. And when they do eventually have to move somewhere to get extra support we want that to be a loving home where the staff have time to give people the care that they deserve.

In Cumbria we have some brilliant care homes, like the new Park View Gardens, and amazing staff who are really invested in what they do. But too often people still don’t get the support they need.

We have a real shortage of beds, both for residential care and for nursing care, and staff are often stretched to breaking point, overworked, underpaid and struggling to give proper care when they are restricted to shorter and shorter visits.

Some of the most heartbreaking cases I deal with in my surgery are when people are moved miles away because we don’t have the beds here in Cumbria to look after them.

This sometimes forces children to travel miles to see their parents, or even worse it splits up couples who have been together for decades, like the recent case of the Bazeleys from Walney.

When Eric Bazeley was moved out of Cumbria for care it meant his devoted wife Madge had to travel hundreds of miles to visit him, now Madge is doing amazing work launching the Barrow Carer’s Travel Trust Fund to help others like her, but really it is unacceptable that this situation should arise at all.

All of this has been made worse by the underfunding of social care by this government, with cuts of £4.6bn since 2010 and an estimated funding gap of £1.9bn next year. Here in Cumbria we have seen real terms cuts of 12.9 per cent and nationwide there are a million older people who are unable to get the care they need, a 400 per cent increase from 2010.

This is a national scandal. It piles pressure on struggling hospitals, GPs and local authorities but more importantly it puts more and more pressure on families who are already stretched.

There is a human cost to all this and it is paid in the worry, the anxiety and the desperation of ordinary families across the country.

In next week’s autumn statement the chancellor simply has to take action to avert the social care crisis and give the people we love the dignity they deserve.