I live with my twin brother who requires a lot of personal care (Aspergers, MECFS and had a massive stroke in 2018) but over the last two years it’s been impossible to recruit and retain PAs, because where we live is quite rural and his needs are demanding and unpredictable. We have a family friend who uses his direct payments to pay for his family who live with him for the care they give, so we asked the social worker if I could be paid to care for my brother while we live together. The social worker said it could be agreed because of the situation, but she told me if I received pay to care and my brother (who owns the house) needed to go into a care home at some point in the future they would be able to force the sale of the house to pay for his care, meaning I’d be made homeless and lose my inheritance. Is this true?

This is really more of a referral than a one off question, but at a level of PRINCIPLE we can say this:

A person with a direct payment which is insufficient to recruit PAs should
a) challenge the sufficiency of the personal budget, evidencing the efforts they have made to recruit
b) ask the council to agree it’s necessary to use the direct payment to pay a close relative living in the same household because there is nobody else to do the work

c) tell the council to put its faith where its supposedly sufficient direct payment rate is, in a manner of speaking, and commission the care, rather than leave the person with direct payments, which can only be treated as an option if the person WANTS to be their own commissioner.

We can see that you have done b) which is good.

However, the information you have been given about the house, is WRONG – or not necessarily correct.

First and foremost we don’t know if your brother has made a will, or if you are assuming you’d inherit the house because there are no other relatives for him to bequeath his house to, or be passed onto on an intestacy (which means he has no will, can’t make one, but there’s a set list of people who inherit – you may not be your brother’s next of kin because parents trump brothers and sisters.) Secondly the house may have been left in trust to your brother during his life which is not the same as his OWNING it and if it’s in trust then it depends on what the trustee/settlor put in the trust deed as to who gets the value of it next. If it’s in trust it doesn’t count for charging purposes at all, though, if your brother goes into a care home eventually.

Secondly, he may own it through someone having deputyship for him when he inherited it himself, if it was recognised then that he did not have the cognitive functional capacity to manage owning a property. In that situation, he owns it but he can’t make a will, and neither can the deputy, so the intestacy rules become important then.

If you are living in your brother’s house at this moment and have no other home, and are caring for free, you do not simply lose all hope of the house not being counted for care charges, just by accepting payment for care. The history of what you have already DONE for your brother would still matter for the purposes of what’s called a Discretionary Disregard of the value of the house, should he need a care home, eventually. 
If you are over 60 for instance, there is a mandatory disregard, but I don’t think you are over 60. That applies as well, if you are a brother who is incapacitated, but I don’t think you are.

What the person hasn’t told you the whole truth about is that there is a discretionary disregard of the value of the house in this situation:

An example where it may be appropriate to apply the disregard is where it is the sole residence of someone who has given up their own home in order to care for the person who is now in a care home

So as you can see, it is all dependent on how it came to be that you moved into your brother’s house and it is not a question that you can work out the answer to, without proper legal advice as to the nature of your brother’s ownership of the house.