From October 2023, no one in England will have to pay more than £86,000 in care costs out of their own pocket. Even for government critics, this is a big step forward in tackling the lottery of old age that for decades has seen a minority lose most of their hard-earned assets just because they were unlucky enough to be struck down by long-term illness that required years of care.
The new safety net – a kind of national insurance against care catastrophe – doesn’t come cheap, at £3.7bn a year by 2028. And yet its main purpose is being undermined because a change to save £900m a year will leave people with fewer assets still vulnerable to losing almost everything.
That £900m is a big sum; after all, the annual spending boost for all of social care announced in September was only £1.8bn, and that was after 18 months of a pandemic that had left parts of the sector at breaking point.
But the political cost could be higher. The way the change has been introduced could not be worse for the government’s attempts to “level up” wealth inequalities in the north and south of England.
In the south-east, the average 70-year-old has property and savings that can be targeted for care costs worth £256,000 compared with £105,000 in Yorkshire and the Humber and £86,000 in the north-east, according to analysis by the Resolution Foundation thinktank. In places with the lowest average house prices – such as Burnley – social care contributions are likely to reach 100% of a property value unless other savings are available. In the south they will be often be less than 20%, Guardian analysis shows.
As the former Conservative health secretary Jeremy Hunt acknowledges, the care cap change is not “progressive”. But Hunt, who has his eyes on greater threats, on Monday cautioned his fellow backbenchers not to rebel, saying that future governments could change the policy. Speaking to council leaders on Monday, he said a more important focus was on increasing overall state funding for social care.
The health and social care committee of MPs that he chairs has said an additional £7bn a year is needed, while councils have put that figure at £10bn. In contrast, the government has offered £1.8bn annually for the next three years. Hunt is “very worried” about funding for social care in this parliament.
Vic Rayner, chief executive of the National Care Forum, told the same council leaders how bad things are right now. She described the staff at one home care operator as being in tears last week because they had to cancel visits to needy people owing to a lack of staff. She said care operators reported increasing difficulties in giving people “happy and fulfilling lives” and that only the essentials of care were now possible. Care homes were turning down requests for complex care packages and people were languishing on hospital wards.
Rayner warned of a “very frightening situation” where the sector would not have enough people to deliver care, with 627,000 more carers forecast to be needed by 2030 because of the ageing population.
The engineering of the social care cap is divisive, but for most it is a positive step. The level of the government’s ambition for the bigger reset of the social care system still to come will matter to everyone.
