The Guardian today:
Reforms to the system for long-term care for the elderly in England and Wales are likely to be delayed until after the next general election in 2015, amid signs that the Treasury thinks the scheme is currently too expensive.
Cross-party talks designed to form a consensus on funding after a report by the Oxford economist Andrew Dilnot ran into trouble on Friday after?Labour?accused the government of unilaterally blocking progress.
The row broke out as?David Cameron?prepared to announce that he will endorse the two key recommendations of the Dilnot report. These are:
? There should be a rise from ?23,250 to ?100,000 in the threshold of savings and assets above which the state stops offering help with care costs.
? A cap of ?35,000 should be imposed on the amount any individual would have to pay towards their own care costs during their lifetime.
The debate on how to fund social care for the elderly, to prevent older people having to sell their homes to pay for residential care, has been burbling for several years now. The last Labour government?favoured a system based on death taxes, prompting?some pretty sleazy Tory electioneering. The Tories countered with a social-insurance based system, but since the election the compromise system described above has emerged.
Interestingly, just this week I found a?deficit-cutting round-robin?where a leading think-tanker proposes a rather different approach ? don?t try to let people keep their homes at all.
The only fair answer is to make baby-boomer pensioners sell their homes and pay for their own care. They have done well out of the housing market, so the choice is between them paying up?even though their children will miss out on a fat inheritance?or forcing workers earning as little as ?9,000 a year to fund care through taxes. The boomers? children might want their windfall, but this is morally undeserving, as it is unrelated to their effort or talent. Protecting the rights of the affluent to slosh their money down to the next generation should not be a priority for any government. Politicians who queue up to sing the praises of the family unit should also be less shy about calling on children to care for their elderly parents.
Strong stuff. Of course, it?s true that baby-boomers in wealthy areas have seen remarkable gains from the value of their homes. Spending government money to enable them to keep them ? passing the value of their sale onto their children, entrenching inequality ? does seem unattractive. But of course, there are parts of the country where house prices haven?t risen so far, and boomers out there who never bought a home at all.
The author of this radical/attention-grabbing suggestion, ?by the way? Step forward, former Demos head honcho Richard Reeves, who?just this week stepped down from the position of policy director to Nick Clegg.
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Freelance journalist & lecturer & soon-to-be MSc Development Studies student at LSE. Interested in development, climate change, technology and popular culture.Source: http://ravcasleygera.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/clegg-advisers-radical-take-on-social-care-reform/
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