Care of low-income householders in ‘urgent need of reform’

12 Mar 10
Low-income people must be the priority for any reform of social care funding, say MPs and think-tanks today
By Jaimie Kaffash

12 March 2010

Low-income people must be the priority for any reform of social care funding, say MPs and think-tanks today.

The Commons health select committee today published its report on the current system and possible reforms. The study says social care is ‘chronically unfunded, severely rationed, locally variable and too often of poor quality’. It adds that the issue has become a ‘political football’ and the Personal Care at Home Bill, first announced in the Queen’s Speech in November, ‘smacks of policy making on the hoof’.

Committee chair Kevin Barron told Public Finance that, although reforms were needed, a clear consensus was more important than the speed of change.

‘There is time to get adequate social care in place that will look after the baby-boomers, who will be in their eighties in 20 years time. There is the funding in the system now. Some of it is unfair and we have highlighted that but it doesn’t mean to say that reform has to happen overnight. You could stage this over years – provided you got the consensus,’ he said.

But he added that the current system was ‘not meeting the needs’ of people on lower incomes and this must be rectified urgently. The means-tested income thresholds for state assistance were ‘unfair and they have not been raised for quite some time now’, he said.

The Resolution Foundation welcomed the MPs’ recommendations, but it said they did not go far enough. The think-tank’s report, Funding future care need, published yesterday, said that householders with an average income of less than £15,800 were worst off. They were unable to afford their care costs but they would be unable to receive state assistance unless the threshold was raised ‘very substantially’.

The report focused on the mechanisms already in place to allow householders to use their equity to pay for their funding. These included deferred payment schemes, which allow householders to take a loan from councils until they sell their house, and charging order powers, which place a debt on the house itself.

But Matthew Whittaker, one of the report’s authors, told PF that deferred payment schemes were seen as overly bureaucratic, while councils were unwilling to use charging order powers because they were often deemed aggressive.

However, he added: ‘More innovative councils are saying that charging orders do not have to be aggressive – they can talk this through with the residents. But other councils were unaware that this was even an option.

‘Councils that are bold enough can use these powers straightaway but I think it would help if central government put something out that made explicit what the limits of the powers were and how they can be used more flexibly.’

The health select committee report also says there should be a debate about whether social care should be wholly funded by the taxpayer. ‘It will be a tough sell, but the consensus we are getting is that the public should at least be asked whether care should be wholly public funded,’ Barron said.

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