Cost of dementia care will treble to £62bn by 2040
DEMENTIA care costs for families will treble to £62billion a year within only two decades, a major report suggests today.
Relatives of the hundreds of thousands of people with dementia already foot a £9billion annual bill for social care and provide £14billion-worth of unpaid care themselves.
But this sum of £23billion is set to soar nearly three- fold by 2040, according to projections by the London School of Economics.
The figures lay bare the huge scale of the burden on the nation’s families. Anyone with more than £23,250 in savings, including the value of their home, is rejected for statefunded social care. This means many people have to sell their family homes to pay for the care of loved ones. Thousands of others give up work to look after relatives.
The Daily Mail is campaigning to end this scandal and in October we took a 356,000-strong petition to Downing Street calling for urgent action. The LSE report, commissioned by the Alzheimer’s Society, projects the rise in costs if no political changes are made.
The cost of dementia care to the NHS will also soar from £5billion in 2019 to £12.5billion in 2040.
Meanwhile the 43 per cent of the social care bill paid by the taxpayer will rise from £7billion to £19.5billion. In total, the cost of dementia care to the economy will reach an eye-watering £94billion, up from £35billion today. While the number of people with dementia is expected to rise from 880,000 to 1.6million by 2040, the cost of care will outstrip this as people live longer and become more frail.
Jeremy Hughes, chief executive at the Alzheimer’s Society, said: ‘ The cost should be spread between us like schools, the NHS and other public services. Every party must go into this election with a solid plan to radically reform dementia care.
‘Families in crisis need action – and they need it now.’
Age UK calculates one in seven elderly people – a total of 1.5million over-65s – are living without assistance for severe care needs due to the scale of the crisis. Its charity director Caroline Abrahams said: ‘These figures have been getting worse as governments dither. Care is a fundamental service on which millions of us depend and it is high time the Government took decisive action to stabilise provision and create a better system for the future.’ Successive
governments have failed over 20 years of reviews, commissions and proposals to deal with the problem.
Boris Johnson promised on his first day as Prime Minister to end the crisis ‘once and for all’ but has since said action will be delayed.
He is thought to have been advised to avoid a detailed response during the election campaign for fear of repeating the catastrophe of Theresa May’s socalled ‘dementia tax’ in 2017.
There was a major backlash when her election manifesto proposed taking money from assets to fund home care and residential care after someone had died.
A Conservative Party spokesman said it was ‘committed to doing all we can to help’. He added: ‘At the Spending Review we announced up to £1.5billion more for social care and in the Queen’s Speech we committed to bringing forward proposals to reform adult social care in England.’