It’s telling that the debate about social care that is so needed in election year, has been kicked off by an article from a financial services industry marketer (Just Group) in the Mail’s This is Money feature, about the cost of a care home, and the need to sell one’s house to fund it.
Will YOU have to sell your home to pay for care? https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/pensions/article-13293451/Will-sell-home-pay-care-years-fund.html?ito=whatsapp_share_article-top
It does cost a fortune because of the subsidy which ANY privately paying resident effectively pays for care for other people – people who have not got sufficient money for it to be counted – for whom our councils get away with paying a much lower weekly fee, simply by being a dominant purchaser in the market.
This subsidy, over the whole system, is what pays for care for people with learning or other lifelong disabilities who would not get a chance to make money or buy a house.
But it means that if you own and run a care home, you don’t really get to set the price of your own services. If you want to be full, you do the bidding of councils who are not subject to the Competition Act in this regard. You may as well be an employee of the council – your profits depend on the contract terms which you don’t get to negotiate if you want to be on the Framework of approved providers. And plenty of councils don’t put fees up even when the National Minimum/Living Wage goes up annually.
Is this sort of a redistributive system more Marxist or more Alt-Right?! You tell me!
Whilst thinking about the irony of that question, the wider social services system is being crashed deliberately to make anyone with reasonable wealth as keen as mustard to buy a financial instrument – an insurance policy or a bond of some kind – to ensure that the care costs cap system IS brought in next time round. The decision-making skills of social workers will be the thing that determines whether or not the financial product pays out.
How good of any government to annex the Care Act and the concept of eligibility to the use of the financial services sector!
Could they, by any chance, be best buddies? Of course! This is England, after all.
The extent to which the financial services industry leadership is driving party politics on this issue is currently classically obscure since no party seems to HAVE a policy on saving social services.
Time to hold one’s MP to account, in my view!!