Reforms to end the care crisis are put back for two more years
LONG-AWAITED reforms to elderly care have been delayed for another two years, prompting fury.
Boris Johnson vowed as prime minister to fix the ‘crisis’ in social care ‘once and for all’ after successive governments had dodged the huge cost.
His plan, announced more than a year ago, would place a lifetime cap of £86,000 on the amount an individual pays for personal care in the hope it would mean pensioners no longer have to sell their family homes.
But yesterday Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said the introduction of the new regime, planned for October 2023, will now be delayed until 2025 after councils warned they did not have the money or the staff to make it work.
He told the Commons that the social care sector did ‘a heroic job looking after children, disabled adults and older people during the pandemic’.
‘Its 1.6 million employees work incredibly hard but even outside the pandemic, the increasing number of over-80s is putting massive pressure on their services. I also heard the very real concerns from local authorities, particularly about their ability to deliver the Dilnot reforms immediately, so I will delay the
‘Will it ever be introduced at all’
implementation for two years, allocating the funding to allow local authorities to provide more care packages.’
He said he would give adult social care an extra £1billion next year and £1.7billion the year after, with added savings coming from higher council tax bills as well as the delays to the care cap originally devised by Sir Andrew Dilnot.
‘Today’s decision will allow the social care system to deliver an estimated 200,000 more care packages over the next two years – the biggest increase in funding under any government of any colour in history,’ Mr Hunt told MPs.
But care reform architect Sir Andrew said he was ‘astonished’ by the move, which has raised fears the cap may never be implemented. It comes after former PM Liz Truss scrapped the national insurance hike intended by Mr Johnson to pay for its £13billion-a-year cost.
Sir Andrew said: ‘The Government promised in September of last year, to one of the most vulnerable groups in our whole country, that it would do this and to let them down now feels like a really, really distressing and deeply regrettable act.’
Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said: ‘Boris had made a firm commitment to introduce it in 2023 and, having raised public expectations so high, we feel it was right for this government to follow through. Delaying it by a further two years raises serious questions over whether it will ever be introduced at all.’
Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said: ‘The Chancellor had previously said that one of his biggest regrets as health secretary was failing to fix social care. Today, he has further delayed the Government’s much-promised social care cap.’
But County Councils Network chairman Tim Oliver said: ‘Postponing these reforms and reinvesting significant additional funding… will go a long way to enable us to address existing pressures, commission more care packages and ensure the reforms are a success on day one of their introduction in 2025.’