Hunt and Javid kept in dark about Tories’ ‘dementia tax’

THE Cabinet ministers responsible for social care were told just 24 hours in advance that the so-called “dementia tax” would be included in the Conservatives’ manifesto, according to reports.

Sajid Javid, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, and Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, were kept in the dark until the day before the document was published.

The policy was drawn up in the Cabinet Office instead of the Departments for Communities and Health, BBC’S Newsnight reported. Ben Gummer, the former Cabinet Office minister and one of the architects of the manifesto, is understood to have worked on the social care Green Paper.

During the election campaign Theresa May announced a dramatic aboutturn on her party’s plans for social care, described by critics as a “dementia tax”.

She said her plans for social care reform, under which pensioners were to be asked to contribute more to the cost of their care, would now include a cap on contributions. The manifesto also contained a commitment to a Green Paper to consult on social care costs.

George Freeman, the head of the Prime Minister’s policy board during the election, described the Tory campaign as a “catastrophe”.

Mr Freeman told Newsnight: “This was a catastrophe of a campaign and I wouldn’t expect necessarily in a snap election it gets signed off by Cabinet and it goes through a series of negotiations, presumably, and discussions.

“So I wouldn’t expect to be holding the pen on the last draft. But I didn’t see any draft. And I think there was a culture in the campaign of ‘we the five or six of us are going to do this’.”

Senior Government sources told The Telegraph at the time that they were left “completely surprised” by the package of reforms.

Mr Hunt was asked about the “dementia tax” on Thursday while addressing the NHS Confederation conference in Liverpool. In his first speech since being reappointed as Health Secretary after the election, he said: “That was a great sadness to me, and I take my share of responsibility for this.

“The failure to explain what we were trying to do in the heat of an election campaign was obviously exploited by our political opponents to frankly misrepresent what the intention of those policy proposals were.”