Those who worked are told to sell their homes to pay for those who didn’t
SIR – Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS, proposes that older people should sell their homes to fund social care (report, April 25). Why?
This is a generation that worked hard to get their own homes. We were not allowed to sit on our backsides and hold our hands out for benefits. At the labour exchange, you were offered three jobs and if one was not taken then your allowances were stopped.
It’s always those who have worked who pay for those who haven’t. Are we saying to youngsters: live for today, spend your money and then let the government look after you? Mary Boyles
New Rossington, South Yorkshire
SIR – It is difficult to disagree that house equity should be used to cover an owner’s social care costs.
This not least because the bulk of that value is likely to have been a mostly speculative (or at least unearned) gain. The need to reduce the tax burden that must otherwise fall on non-property owners must prevail over an understandable desire to leave assets to descendants.
It might be less contentious and painful if the value of a home on a person entering care was regarded as collateral for a government loan to cover care costs. The property would be sold and the care amount recouped after the owner’s death.
Being, ultimately, a charge on society, care costs of those without either property or assets should be funded from a designated inheritance tax receipts fund. Tony Stone
Oxted, Surrey
SIR – Mr Stevens says the old should sell their homes, as they are in a “relatively advantaged position” over the young. Has he not realised that the young expect to inherit those homes? John Stephenson
Marlow, Buckinghamshire
SIR – Mr Stevens’s solution appears to be short-term, for a single generation.
Home ownership is dropping and the young find it increasingly difficult to buy a property. Once home-owners have been forced to pay for their care, how will the next generation’s be paid for? They’ll have no assets to plunder. Roger Gentry
Sutton-at-hone, Kent
SIR – I, like many pensioners, agree with Simon Stevens. However, we cannot progress until a united front is presented to local authorities, which for a number of years have refused to pay the economic costs of care for those who have fewer assets.
It is clearly wrong that those who do own houses should provide a substantial subsidy to the council. Who in Government will stand up and insist this wrong is corrected? RF Solly
Flitwick, Bedfordshire
SIR – At what point did the nation’s private housing become the property of the state, to disburse as it thinks fit? Barry Hughes
Lytham St Annes, Lancashire