The oldest are by far the richest – it would help if they paid for much-needed extra care, says Mary Riddell.
Today Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, will announce plans for a national care service for the elderly in a White Paper outlining a comprehensive system, free at the point of use. As Mr Burnham will tell the Commons, in a reference to the five key areas outlined by Beveridge, fear of growing old is the "sixth giant" overshadowing progress.
Crucial to Mr Burnham's plans is the Personal Care at Home Bill offering a guaranteed free service to 280,000 of the most vulnerable. This measure, so mauled in the Lords that most thought it dead, will also be re-introduced in the Commons today. Mr Burnham, who is offering a less rushed variant of his reform, believes it will become law in this session.
Part two of a plan designed to protect people's savings and homes will offer help to care-home residents in the next session. Part three, for the Parliament after next, will specify who pays, and how, for the final pillar of the welfare state. Mr Burnham favours a compulsory levy, in which people can choose whether to defer their pension until 68, pay a tax on their estate or contribute in their retirement. A cross-party commission, to be set up if Labour wins this election, would study the options.
Does Mr Cameron subscribe to the paradoxical Right-wing view that the state, while far too powerful, should pay for all in their dotage, irrespective of their wealth? Does he think the old, the richest cohort in the land, should be subsidised by the young and most indebted? Or, in the King's Fund wider question, does he think the cleaner on £8,000 a year should pay for the care of someone living in a £400,000 house that he will leave to his children?
Whatever his instincts, Mr Cameron has a plan for a scheme under which people can choose to pay £8,000 to cover their bills for residential care. Not only would this have the perverse incentive of propelling people into nursing homes – as the charity Counsel & Care points out, there is no evidence from anywhere else in the world that enough people subscribe to voluntary levies to create a workable system.
Abridged
SOURCE: The Telegraph, UK
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