1:49PM GMT 15 Jan 2013

Last week, Parliament spent a full afternoon debating the extremely important issue of dementia. Colleagues from across the House spoke with real passion and emotion, sometimes based on personal experience, about a dreadful condition which in just a few years time will affect over a million people, or one in three of those aged over 65.

Most people will already know someone who has dementia or who will suffer from dementia in the future, and so how politicians deal with our ageing population and all the related issues that it brings is a real life electoral issue. People judge a government on its morality, and what can be more important than how we treat our vulnerable elderly?

It breaks my heart to hear about those in their retirement living in poverty. The Government has done the right thing to introduce the triple lock into pension increases, maintain the commitment to the winter fuel allowance and continue with cold weather payments. But with adult social care budgets being cut and a care funding crisis looming, so much more needs to be done, and it is time we recalibrated our spending priorities to ensure that taxpayers money, stretched as it is, goes into providing the services we need at home, not financing projects abroad.