Charity issues warning on ‘social care cap’

Ahead of the House of Lords debate in the next few weeks on the Health & Social Care Bill, Age UK has voiced concerns that the centrepiece of the prime minister’s social care reforms, the ‘social care cap’, will be beyond the reach of less well-off older people, unless the government changes course.

The charity is urging peers to vote against a government change that “waters down” its own social care cap scheme, and that does so in a way that may disproportionately penalise older people who are less well off. 

New analysis by Age UK of the government’s impact assessment for the reform revealed that a wealthier older person needing care could reach the £86k care cap in just a couple of years, whereas someone with fewer assets could still have a decade or more of paying fees ahead. The charity added that such a person might never reach the cap at all, despite them spending a greater proportion of their money on care costs.

“It is really extraordinary that the government wants to make a change to its own social care cap scheme which will take it beyond the reach of most older people with low or modest amounts of income and wealth,” said Age UK charity director Caroline Abrahams, “while leaving the situation of the better off, in leafier parts of the country, more or less intact. This is patently unfair, regressive and counter to the government’s ‘levelling up agenda’.”

Age UK expressed great disappointment when the government announced in the autumn that it wanted to bring in a technical change to how progress towards the cap is calculated, making it harder to reach and affecting the less well-off disproportionately.

When the government’s proposed change was voted on in the House of Commons in the autumn, 19 Conservative MPs voted against it and 67 abstained.

“I am struggling to remember the last time a government of any complexion trumpeted a social and economic reform, and then ripped the heart out of it, of its own accord, less than two months later,” added Abrahams. “The only possible reason for doing so is cost-cutting, but to expect those with the fewest assets to pay the price, while favouring the better-off, is completely the wrong choice, in our view.

“It’s no way to treat older people and their families, who have waited so long for reassurance that they will not be impoverished by endlessly spiralling care bills,” added Abrahams. “The government’s social care cap scheme was supposed to provide it for everyone but, if this change goes through, huge numbers of ordinary older people can kiss that sense of relief goodbye – as it should be noted, can most disabled people of working age who use social care too. The cap will be of precious little use to most of them either.” 

“We hope that members of the House of Lords will interrogate the impact of the government’s proposed change on people who use social care, and their families, with tenacity and care,” concluded Abrahams. “If they do we are confident that they will agree with us that undermining its own reform is the wrong thing for the government to do, and vote the government’s changes down. Ministers really do need to think again.”

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