Despite additional cash injections, public funding for social care is 3% lower in real terms than in 2010
it did not seem like a particularly bold pronouncement. Two years ago Philip Hammond promised £2bn extra for social care in his spring budget. While doing so, the chancellor struck a characteristically dour tone, warning that the sector required more than just the occasional injection of dosh; it needed a strategic, long-term plan.
Unsurprisingly, a strategic approach to social care has not emerged in its absence. Despite additional cash injections, public funding of social care is 3% lower in real terms than it was in 2010. In the same period, the number of people over 65 has grown by 19% and the number of working-age people requiring care is also on the rise. Public funding is provided by local authorities and is available only to those with assets of less than £23,250 .
The funding system discourages investment in other ways, too. Because it is hard to predict how long care will be needed, people tend to underspend to ensure they have enough money to last their dotage. Others hope that they will require no care at all, or do not understand how the system works and think they will not have to pay for it, and therefore fail to save enough. The result is both worse care and a lack of innovation.
In the absence of proposals from the government, others are floating ideas. Last summer the House of Commons committees for health and local government issued a joint report calling for a new tax on those aged over 40 to fund social care. On April 29th Damian Green, a former Tory cabinet minister, published his own proposal in a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-leaning think-tank.
Social-care experts quibbled with Mr Green’s sums and his confidence in the emergence of an insurance market for old-age care. But the more damaging attacks came from Labour. John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, claimed Mr Green had “let the cat out of the bag about Tory intentions to punish older people with a tax on getting old”. Meanwhile Matt Hancock, the health secretary, ruled out any option that would include the family home when totting up somebody’s assets.
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