Jeremy Hunt set to delay social care reforms to help fix UK public finances
A plan to limit the amount an individual in England would have to pay towards personal social care, due to take effect next year, will be delayed for at least two more years as chancellor Jeremy Hunt seeks to fill a £55bn fiscal hole in next week’s Autumn Statement.
The decision means yet another delay to the policy, which has been on the statute book since 2014 and is judged by experts to be key to addressing the risk of an individual facing catastrophic care costs. It was last year readopted by Boris Johnson’s government as part of his much-vaunted claim to have “fixed” social care.
However, people familiar with discussions said prime minister Rishi Sunak had never favoured the policy while serving as Johnson’s chancellor.
Natasha Curry, deputy director of policy at the Nuffield Trust, a think-tank, pointed to the scale of the crisis in social care, where about 10 per cent of posts are vacant. She said a delay risked “losing the momentum that we’re building around potentially more significant reforms in the future to put social care on a more stable footing”.
Simon Bottery, senior fellow in social care at the King’s Fund, another think-tank, said the “huge concern is that if we do delay the cap . . . history tells us that there’s a real risk that a delay becomes essentially an abandonment”.
The Treasury declined to comment.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Jim Pickard
