Elderly care system ‘in need of reform’
Care for the elderly in the UK is “unfair”, “inconsistent” and will be inadequate in the long term without radical reform, a report says today.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) says the elderly care system lacks clarity about how much people should contribute and how much they should be entitled to.
The report’s author, Donald Hirsch, warned that the cost of long-term care would rise four-fold in the next 50 years, and said if the system was not reformed the burden would fall on individuals.
Charities for the elderly welcomed the report, with Age Concern saying the report shone a “spotlight on the state of older people’s care in Britain”.
The cost of caring for the 1.7 million older people in Britain who need it is high. Those with more than £20,500 in savings, or a home worth more than that, have to use this money to fund the cost of care.
The JRF says the threshold at which people are eligible for help should be raised to £100,000. At the moment, people with average-priced house spend more than half the proceeds from its sale on paying for residential care.
The foundation also believes there should be a clearer link between people’s conditions and the help available to them. Presently, some get all their costs paid by the NHS, while others get very little even though they may face similar-sized care bills.
It calls for a better deal for those on low-incomes, who currently have to give up nearly all of their pensions entitlements before receiving local authority help for long-term care.
“In the next 50 years we will have to spend about four times as much in real terms on long-term care as we do now,” Mr Hirsch warned.
He continued: “If we keep our present system of public funding, most of the increase will fall on individuals, many of whom will find it difficult to pay.”
And he called for the creation of a “fair and clear” system that people would be willing to pay for in extra tax or national insurance contributions.
Age Concern director general Gordon Lishman echoed these comments, describing the current system as a “shambles” and calling for the government to address the “severe underfunding of long term care”.
