What’s wrong with bribing the middle classes?

A Care Isa could be part of a culture change that encourages people to think about preparing for old age

Hold the phone: the Tories have come up with a half decent idea. The Treasury is flirting with the creation of a Care Isa exempt from Inheritance Tax. If you need it, the money you invested goes toward looking after you. If you don’t, it gets passed on to your loved ones tax free. Smart and philosophically conservative, what’s not to love?

Cue objections from Sarah Wollaston, the Tory MP for Totnes – a doctor who is conscientious but so Left-wing that one suspects she only sits with the Conservatives due to some clerical error. It won’t solve the care crisis, she says; it doesn’t pool risk; and it only helps “a small minority of wealthy people”.

First things first, what’s wrong with helping the middle class, labelled in this instance as “wealthy”? Middleclassness isn’t a permanent state of being. All it takes is an accident or an illness to stop their income, blow their savings and push them down the ladder. Among the many ways government squeezes them for cash is inheritance tax, which people try to escape by, say, spending their Isas rather than keeping them on standby for care (a classic example of the tax system encouraging bad behaviour). Last year, the Treasury raked in a record £5 billion plus from death duties, and if it were to embrace the Care Isa you can bet it would set the amount you can save very low. Philip Hammond wouldn’t want to lose that much revenue or be accused of setting up a tax avoidance scheme. Perhaps Dr Wollaston is in the right party after all.

So, if the cash sums people can put aside will be paltry (especially compared to the gargantuan costs of care) what then would be the point? The answer: it’s a start.

There’s a temptation when promoting a new idea for its backers to declare that this itself will “save” the social care system – but the reality is we need a big mix of solutions. By 2046, a quarter of the population will be over 65, and while I’m looking forward to old age – I’ve been dreaming of retirement since the day I started work – the threat of physical or mental decline is troubling. As I’ve written in this column before, a key solution is the family: most of us would rather be looked after by people we know, not strangers. But if that doesn’t work out, there are professionals. They just have to be paid for.

In Manchester, Mayor Andy Burnham wants to meet the challenge with some old-fashioned municipal socialism. Burnham was dismissed too lightly when he was a Labour MP. He has distractingly beautiful eyes: no matter whether he’s talking about the NHS or hanging, the audience is wondering whether he was born with it or it’s the Maybelline. Which is a pity because he is passionate and imaginative, as demonstrated by his proposal to integrate NHS and social care, something he wants to trial in Manchester, at the same time as ending social care charges and replacing them, possibly, with a whole new levy.

Good for Mr Burnham for being straightforward. Taxes can serve a moral purpose and if we are to get them, let us take them openly and face on, like a firing squad. The problem with the Tories in 2017, when they floated their own social care solution (the infamous dementia tax), was that they made a tough sell disingenuous by watering it down when the complaints rolled in. Without a long-term answer, costs have been quietly dumped on local authorities at the same time as the Treasury has cut council funding. The poor have become casualties of a shabby attempt to cook the books.

If the Conservatives don’t address this, they’ll cede the battle to the Left, which will be on hand with blueprints for a National Care Service, which sounds snappy until one remembers how dreadful welfare state bureaucracies can be: the red tape, the waste, the cost and, most terrifyingly, the rationing. No, Conservatives should argue that while the state is very important – yes, primary in importance – what we need to build for social care is a healthy mixed economy. Reliance on family. Pooled risk insurance schemes. And a willingness of wealthier individuals to stake their own wealth when it comes to the cost of emergencies.

No, the Care Isa won’t solve everything. But it could be part of a culture change. It would effectively bribe us to consider preparing for old age – and even just getting big spenders like me to think about the future is a step in the right direction. It’s a reminder of what conservatism looks like when it tries its hand at social reform rather than just fannying about with political correctness.

One ambition of modern conservatism is to help people acquire things and hold on to them, which means protecting them from dangers that lie beyond the power of the individual, such as unemployment and death. The socialist would agree with that, but where the conservative can go that the socialist cannot is to liberate us, too, from the long arm of the state. We should be free to pass things on to our kids. We should be free to purchase private care. I hope I don’t have to wait until I’m 65 to hear the Tories say such things again. FOLLOW Tim Stanley on Twitter @timothy_stanley; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion