Fixing social care has to be the immediate social policy priority for the government, both in this week’s autumn statement and beyond, says Teresa Pearce. The crisis is so pressing, the human impact so profound, that it can no longer be ignored. “I don’t want elderly people or adults with complex needs living a life that isn’t living, and that’s what we have at the moment.”

Pearce, the shadow communities secretary, says that next year, 2017, will be “make or break” for social care. The system, she says, is teetering on the precipice: services are cut to the statutory minimum and rationed; an estimated one million people who need care get no support; providers can no longer afford to deliver services and are handing back contracts. “People were thinking that this [austerity cuts] was a wave we would ride and a better day would come, but it hasn’t, and it has just got worse.”

Stabilising the system by plugging the funding gap is essential, says Pearce, but it is also time to look at the bigger picture: to build a financially sustainable care system, one that takes pressure off a creaking NHS, enables people to grow old without fear and with dignity, and that values hard-pressed care workers. Theresa May’s government, she believes, has to show that it recognises the seriousness of the social care crisis, not just with money, but with a strategic vision of how the UK will provide for its ageing society. After six years of cuts to local government, she says, the problem is not just that services are fraying, but that councils now struggle to look beyond the multiple day-to-day crises of austerity. Pearce would like to see a commitment to the idea of integrating health and social care services, to think beyond simply patching up the current system and start working out what services we need, and how we pay for them. “We need to fund councils to allow them to not just manage today and next week, but to have vision, to invest.”

Pearce (who is standing in for Easington MP Grahame Morris, currently receiving treatment for lymphatic cancer) does not fit the stereotype of the modern career politician with little experience of real life. She did not enter parliament until the age of 55 (even then, it was as an “accidental MP”). When she says, apropos of welfare cuts and rising homelessness, that “the whole fabric of what we think is a decent society is breaking down”, she does so as someone rescued from poverty by a properly functioning welfare state.

Public services and the welfare state, she says, “are the epitome of what society is about”. As a south London mum aged 18, she was abandoned by her then husband. “I was left literally holding the baby, and we were living in a terrible slum. So I got social housing; a place in a council-run nursery; and a careers adviser, all funded through a welfare system that set me and my daughter on a road to prosperity. That doesn’t exist any more. The welfare state is there so that we all help each other along.”

That intervention in the 1970s was critical: the stability it provided led the way to a successful career as a tax investigator and senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “If you invest a little in people, it actually saves. That hand to help me up meant that I’ve repaid it goodness knows how many times. I was a 40% taxpayer, [so is] my daughter ... we repaid it a million times over. The reason I’m happy to pay my taxes is that I want other people to have those life changes”.

If you invest a little in people, it saves. I and my daughter have repaid that hand that helped me many times Teresa Pearce

Her personal experience may help explain why - though she makes no specific commitments - she does not shy from making the case for why public services not only need investment but that the most effective way to achieve this is through taxation. She accepts there is a huge fear among politicians of borrowing, even when borrowing is cheap, and it saves money in the long run (she sees her own teenage interaction with the welfare state as a perfect example of “invest-to-save”). But she points out there is a cost also to not funding. She cites the £3.5bn spent by councils in the last five years on housing homeless families in emergency accommodation. “Why aren’t we borrowing money to train young people, to build the houses that we need so we are not spending an absolute fortune that is going directly into the pockets of private landlords. It’s crazy.” She would like to see more honesty and realism about tax and spend. She worries that politicians pretend to voters that we can have lower taxes and still retain quality services. People think they get nothing from taxes, but politicians never properly explain that the taxation-funded services they use, from roads to schools, don’t happen by accident. “The Labour vision is we all chip in when we can so that nobody falls behind.” She supports devolved powers for councils, and the freedom from the “dead hand of central government” that this purports to offer, including the ability for councils to levy funds and retain business rates locally. But she would keep some national pooling of resources, redistributed through government grants to ensure decent services for people in all areas, rich and poor. “It’s like social care. I pay my tax, and I’m not just interested in looking after my nan, it’s everyone’s nan. It’s not just my street I want to look after, it’s everybody’s.”

Pearce is ambivalent about Liverpool city council’s recent proposal to hold a referendum over whether to raise council tax from the 3.99% cap to 10% in order to meet a £90m black hole that, unmet, would see huge reductions in all council services. In principle, putting council tax up in deprived areas “isn’t going to help because your council tax base is quite low and you are actually just punishing people who are deprived in the first place”. On the other hand, a referendum might actually start a proper public debate about what the central purpose of the council is, what it should provide and how we fund it. She adds: “What the result of the referendum will be I don’t know, but the good thing hopefully is that local people in Liverpool will understand why the local council can’t fund everything.”

What local government might look like under a national Labour administration has not emerged from the depths of the party’s policy forum. But Pearce would want to see a thorough review of what councils do. She believes local authorities are best placed to deliver local services and shape the local community vision, although she has no sentimental attachment to the town hall good old days (her own experience, as a one-term councillor, was not the happiest). The problem is that no one is thinking strategically about the future. “There isn’t any space for that sort of thought when you are just managing emergencies day in, day out.”

Curriculum vitae

Age 61.

Family Two grown-up daughters and five grandchildren.

Lives Erith, Kent.

Education St Thomas More RC comprehensive, Eltham, south-east London.

Career 2016-present: shadow secretary of state for communities and local government; 2015-16: shadow minister for housing and planning; 2015: member, public accounts committee; 2011-15: member, Treasury select committee; 2010-15: member, work and pensions select committee; 2010-present: Labour MP for Erith and Thamesmead; 1999-2009: senior manager and tax investigator, PricewaterhouseCoopers; 1997-99: corporate tax manager, MBS; 1987-97: tax manager, Knox Cropper; 1981-84: tax assistant, RGKemp Bexleyheath; 1980-81: gym receptionist; 1974-79: PAYE tax officer, HM Revenue & Customs; 1973-79: barmaid.

Public life 1998-2002: Labour councillor, Bexley council.

Interests Literature, cinema, Scandi-noir drama, Francophile.