In short, your mums care costs are her responsibility and no one else’s.
her assets will include:
Half the value of their property, if owned jointly - but if your dad continues to live there it’s not taken into account. I have to say that my MIL jointly owned a property with FIL, and no charge or anything was set on it when she went into care. She was in nursing care for 4.5 years at £7000 a month, but they never came after the house as an asset either before or after her death. If FIL had died, and the house sold, they would have taken the money then, but that didn’t happen. I’m not sure if this is a Scottish thing, but we didn’t rock the boat to ask!
Half the value of any joint accounts or investments. If your dad is going to ‘reorganise’ anything in this respect, he needs to be aware that he may be asked to explain this during the financial assessment It does make things easier to manage if you set up a separate account, and redirect her pensions into them. Your dad will essentially be living on his own, so all direct debits and bills etc should stay linked with his account (don’t forget to change the joint account to single).
there are two factors taken into account when deciding who pays for care.
- Financial assessment confirms that she has assets more than £23,500
- whether a care assessment by social services has confirmed that residential / nursing care is the only option to keep her safe / cared for.
1 yes, 2 no - she can choose to go into care and will self fund. If her money runs out, social services will need to agree to continue to fund her, by doing a care assessment.
1 no, 2 yes - social services will meet the cost of care. I can’t tell you if it works like this everywhere in Scotland but my FIL basically ran up the nearest private care home that provided nursing care, found a space, council agreed to pay.. MIL’s tiny pension was taken as well, but £500 a month was pretty paltry compared to care costs of nearly £7,000 a month 🙄. She was left something like £23 a week to buy shampoo, pay for haircuts, chiropody etc.
1-yes, 2 yes - as per the first answer except she’s kind of preapproved for the council to step in when her own money runs out.
That’s how it worked for my PIL anyway, in Edinburgh. FIL didn’t pay anything, council paid everything once it was agreed this was the only option, family had the freedom to choose which home she went into, no one paid any top ups but MIL own pension went to the care fees.
It would have been much trickier if it had been FIL going into care. His assets on paper were much bigger than hers and he has a very good pension. She would have needed some of that to live on, it couldn’t all go on care fees.