Ivan Lewis has caused a stir among the political commentariat today with an interview in The Independent dubbed the first direct attack on Gordon Brown by a minister since the Glasgow East by-election disaster.

Lewis urged Brown to recover his political courage to give Labour a fighting chance of winning the next election through policies including higher taxes on top earners to lower burdens on low and middle-income families and, possibly, a windfall tax on energy companies to tackle fuel poverty.

Lewis obviously doesn't want to be out of a job after the next election. But the importance of his intervention can be traced to another interview with the care services minister published today, in Community Care.

In it, Lewis challenges local authorities and other adult social care leaders to deliver on the opportunities created by what he described as "the most profoundly important year in a generation" for the sector.

A politician's hyperbole? Perhaps. But look at what's happened in the past year - the national continuing care framework; the consultation on the Valuing People Now strategy for people with learning disabilities; a new carers strategy; a consultation on the first ever national dementia strategy for England; the launch of the Putting People First programme to personalise services, and the start of a debate on the long-term future of care and support, leading to a green paper next year.

It is a massive agenda - heralding a transformation of adult social care - and one that will require clear and ongoing central government leadership to see it to fruition.

Which leads us to the question of what will happen should Labour leave office in 2010 - or possibly earlier should a change in the party's leadership this autumn trigger an election next year.

The Putting People First agenda is a three-year programme - and in his interview with us today, Lewis says councils should face a day of reckoning in 2011 on how far they have personalised services. Failure to deliver could lead to them losing their adult care commissioning role, he says.

Should the green paper be published, as expected, next Spring, the earliest that any legislation could pass through parliament is 2010 - and the likelihood is that the process could take much longer than that.

Two questions arise. Can we be sure that Labour will maintain its current momentum on social care through to a general election? And what are the Tories' plans for adult social care?

On the first point, social care reform - like securing our future energy supply and pensions - is a long-term project whose benefits should be felt over the next decades rather than years.

As an election nears, then, Labour could be tempted to put it to one side as the political battleground narrows to the traditional territory of crime, the NHS, education, immigration and the economy.

By the same token, it's just the sort of issue that should be amenable to a cross-party solution, particulary if the conclusion is reached that higher taxes are required to fill the coming blackhole in social care funding - which leads us to our second question on the Tories.

In an interview with us in November 2006, Stephen O'Brien - who shadows Lewis - stressed the party's commitment to individual budgets and direct payments so it should be fair to assume that the Putting People First agenda will not be reversed.

But on the green paper, Lewis told us that the Tories' position was merely to continuously "restate the scale of the problem" - in terms of rising numbers of older and disabled people and greater expectations of services - rather than provide solutions. He said that while he was keen to achieve political consensus he was currently not too confident of doing so.

Lewis's view on this point is, of course, far from dispassionate, and things could change over the next year, providing the sort of political consensus reached over the future of pensions.

Let us hope so. If Lewis is right about this being an unprecedented opportunity for the social care sector then it really must not be missed. 

Read the complete post at http://www.communitycare.co.uk/blogs/social-work-blog/2008/07/ivan-lewis-and-a-tale-of-two-interviews.html