I’m a boomer and we have already gladly sold PILs house to pay for the care FIL needed and which enabled him to live out his life in dignity. I grew up in a time when you didn’t think your financial future had inheritance factored in. We didn’t know that our parents homes would end up worth exponentially more than they paid for them. So we were very grateful that it enabled him to get the care he needed when it cost £1500 pounds we month. The people who cared for him were amazing but most in a prosperous town in the south east were EU citizens and are no longer allowed to come here. The non profit that run the home are unable to fill vacancies even though they pay higher than industry average wages and have excellent career development and HR policies.
So this proposal just buys a bit more treatment before you will still have to sell your home, it just ring fences £90k of your children’s in heritable instead of £23.5k. It does nothing to address the actual issues in social care of staffing shortages and the huge shortfall in public sector funding that has to be made up by privately funded care. The extra money falls short of the funding level in 2010. It does nothing for the younger people who make up half the people needing care who don’t so many assets in the first place.
Finally worst if all it shifts the cost on the younger generation, many of whom if they don’t have a Bank if Mum and Dad have no hope of buying a house.
Boris Johnson is a snake oil salesmen, remember the promise of a Brexit dividend for the NHS. He has only landed on a NI increase because so many believe it goes to the NHS (it doesn’t, it is another layer of general tax) But then that is what populists do “Why propose a six point policy based on evidence when you can blame somebody else”. All he cares about us hanging on to his older voters and making it look as off he hasn’t increased taxes.
But when their parent starts to struggle with the world and has round the clock care needs and the care home no longer has the staffing to care for them adequately perhaps it will dawn on people that not one politician has come up with a sustainable evidence based fairly funded policy to deal with the issues. You know that old fashioned concept of good governance…
And there was a little Covid bounce in all this, £1.5bn is quoted as saved on the pensions of the 150k+ who died of Covid as a result of the governments incompetence in controlling infection as they have done in other countries. That is what you mean to the government, better off dead.