Smoke and mirrors cannot conceal the need still to sell your house in order to pay for care

SIR – The care-payment cap announced this week is straight from the Gordon Brown book of smoke and mirrors.

If you own a house you might pay £1,500 a week in a care home, with one third for bed and board and two thirds for personal care. For 86 weeks (average stay being 18 to 24 months) you’ll have to find £86,000 care costs plus £43,000 for B&B. Total: £129,000.

That’s not the end. You will be means tested and may have to find £500 a week for as long as you stay. Unless you have savings, the only way to pay is with your house – maybe not while you and possibly a spouse live but most certainly from your estate when you die. The local authority will put the equivalent of a mortgage on your house to be paid from its sale. Tony Foot

Mosterton, Dorset

SIR – At AIG, the monolith created by Hank Greenberg, I learnt that his skill was knowing how to reinsure the outside risk in insurance business, known as the tail, while retaining the predictable element of each policy.

In the case of care for the elderly, only the Government can afford to underwrite this tail risk. But by raising National Insurance contributions, the PM has created the misleading impression that the entire insurance cost has been nationalised.

Yet in the great majority of cases, where care costs last only a few years, there will be no government payout at all. But the risk can now be insured.

Sufficient insurance take-up is essential for this. To achieve sufficient scale, employers should be compelled to provide insurance. With scale, this model could be integrated vertically, as Bupa does with its hospitals. Care homes are a cottage industry, with scope to invest in efficiency and drive down costs and insurance rates.

Because the full cost of government backstop cover should be phased, it could be met by raising income tax after the next election – avoiding a ruinous broken promise.

Nick St Aubyn

Dunsfold, Surrey

SIR – Having worked in the private sector, apart from a few years in the Army, I know that one always had to justify a capital budget to the board or a bank loan for one’s business by means of a full business plan.

While I cannot stop HMG from raiding my pension with a dividend tax, I can and will withdraw my support for the Conservative Party until such time as it produces its business plan.

Charlie Goodall

East Stratton, Hampshire

SIR – When Sajid Javid replaced Matt Hancock as Health Secretary I thought: “At last, someone who understands economics and can help Rishi Sunak in his solitary rearguard action against the stupidity that prevails in No 10.” How wrong I was! It took a week before the “Blob” had absorbed Javid.

The NHS will soak up this extra money like a sponge, and there will be nothing to show for it.

Derek Thornton

Bracknell, Berkshire

SIR – You report (September 9) that the NHS is recruiting 42 senior executives at salaries of up to £270,000.

Such management excesses are common in the 217 NHS trusts in England. A trust in Derbyshire is advertising for an Assistant Director, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, at £73,000 a year, whose woke job description reads like a parody of management excess.

Sajid Javid now presides over this bureaucracy. Has he any credible plans to direct taxpayer money to the clinicians and nursing staff who actually interact with the patient?

Michael Staples

Seaford, East Sussex

SIR – If I were an adviser to the unfortunate Sir Keir Starmer, now that the Conservatives have appropriated everything from his policy drawer, I would suggest his only hope was to stand on a ticket to reinstate foxhunting, leaded petrol and hanging.

John Springs

London SW3