Government scraps cap on care costs to help tackle spending ‘black hole’

[FiddlyDiddlyDee]

"The social care plan would have introduced an £86,000 cap on the amount an older or disabled person would have to pay towards their support at home or in care homes from next October.

After spending £86,000 on their care, people with a high level of need would have had their care costs paid for by local authorities."

My take on scrapping this is that it looks like another move that's punitive to the lower middle class. Many of the lower middle will burn through everything they've got in short order and leave nothing to their struggling children that need it.

Everything labour does is an attack on the lower middle, this is their standard go to rather than the upper classes or the conglomerates who should be paying much higher taxes, it’s so demoralising and feels like it really discourages social mobility

Goodbye social mobility. What's their plan? Wait until we're all poor before properly taxing the mega rich?

This is bad news and is going to put even more pressure on vulnerable families. And yes they seem to be attacking the lower middle classes whilst the mega rich and corporations continue to amass their wealth.

Social mobility shouldn't be funded by inheritance- that's almost the exact opposite of what it should be

You should go up in the world on your own merit

It's not attacking the middle it's taking it from richer pensioners

The £86,000 cap was not affordable.

The previous government had kicked the start date down the road twice and abolished the extra money on NI that was supposed to pay for it.

Whether you end up needing care is a lottery.

Whether, should you need it, the State should backfill your kids' inheritance is a moot point.

This is a perfectly sensible policy. Those who can afford to self-fund do so, then the public money is there for those who actually need it.

I have my elderly father living with me. He has Alzheimer's and will need residential care eventually. I am fully aware that everything he has will go to pay for his care, and I won't inherit anything. This is fine. Inheritance isn't a right and he's my dad, not a savings account. If his money runs out and he still needs care, then the state will take over - that's the way it should be.

But it's not taking it from richer pensioners because the upper middle who have already been able to easily fund their childrens privelidges will still pass on a large amount of money. Do you even understand how big the wealth disparity is between the upper middle and lower middle? We're talking several million versu a few hundred k.

How on earth do you thnk social mobility will happen if policies like these keep helping the upper middle pull away further from everyone else?

That's strange

The shadow care secretary said they were committed to this prior to the election

So I guess their fully costed manifesto wasn't fully costed?

Was there anything in the manifesto about Social Care?

There should have been; it's a massive problem kicked down the road for generations.

https://news.sky.com/story/labour-says-sneaky-social-care-cap-change-will-hit-poorest-pensioners-hardest-12471057

Also Labour didn't think the care cap weren't far enough. Do you want to hear their own quote about it

"We already knew most people won't hit the cap because it doesn't cover board and lodging in care homes, and that at £86,000 the cap would still mean many people will have to sell their homes to pay for their care - against everything Boris Johnson promised.
"It has now been revealed that the poorest pensioners will have to pay even more, something Andrew Dilnot - who proposed the cap - explicitly ruled out because it was so unfair.
"That this Tory government has failed to be straight with those who've given so much to our country is a total disgrace, but utterly unsurprising. Our elderly people deserve better."

Buy yeah suddenly this cap that doesn't actually go far enough is "unnafordable" and our elderly people need to sell their homes to pay for their care.

Well, the books are worse than they expected, reserves spent 3x and 21 billion of NI cuts to pay for.

Looks like civil service signed off the Tories plans but now also sign off Labours ones too, they cannot be both right!

Hunts tax cuts were so irresponsible, the economy should grow first, then tax cuts, not the other way around.

Now we have to pay for it.

@FiddlyDiddlyDee You re going on as if this was something Labour have reversed, the Tories never had a cap on care costs, they just said they would have one... easy to say when you know you re going to lose the next election.

Oh right, so austerity 2 begins with people who are already struggling in this country?

Yes, i'm afraid, whats the alternative? we already owe 98% of our GDP as debt and its set to increase.

Like i said, the NI cuts should never happened, we then wouldn't be so stretched.

All we can hope is Labour grow the economy, quite how is another matter, no one is proposing a wealth tax or similar.

You re going on as if this was something Labour have reversed, the Tories never had a cap on care costs, they just said they would have one... easy to say when you know you re going to lose the next election

https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2024/04/26/labour-still-committed-to-cap-on-care-costs-shadow-minister-tells-sector-leaders/

Labour is still committed to implementing the cap on care costs and related reforms to adult social care charging, the shadow care minister said yesterday.
Andrew Gwynne told the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services’ (ADASS) annual spring seminar that, should the party win the forthcoming election, it would “seek to introduce” the changes first conceived of by economist Andrew Dilnot in a 2011 report for the then coalition government.

Oh I don't know, perhaps a wealth tax which hits people around the 3million+ mark instead of the 500k- mark?

Lets hope they do.

Oh i'd be all for it but apparently it would mean the rich leaving the UK, so it wont happen.

Jeremy Corbyn (of whom I am not otherwise a fan) had the creation of a National Care Service, to be joined-up with the NHS, in one or both of the manifestos that he ran under. But it didn't get much traction in debates, as far as I recall.

It would of course have cost a lot of money, probably best paid for by extending inheritance tax since the beneficiaries would have been leaving larger inheritances. I don't recall if there were specific tax plans for it.

So basically this old chestnut is getting trotted out to protect their tory chums.

Perhaps rich people clearing off might go some way to rebalancing paper wealth with societal value.

The rich always threaten to leave. I wonder if there are any figures to support their threat 🤔

If all the rich people tried to cleared off they'd be poorer wouldn't they because there wouldn't be other rich people to buy their assets.

No there isn't & the UK is still a low tax country.

But we seem to live in fear of it happening!!!

Well, plenty of people continued to vote in the Tories after Austerity 1. Would you rather still have them in Government, after the shit show that they perpetrated?

That's a strawman. It's got nothing to do with this thread.

Labour actually proposed a mansion tax in 2014 for properties worth £2m or more.