[guide.chat] cap on elderly care

From: vanessa <qwerty1234567a@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "GUIDE CHAT" <guide.chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:44:26 -0000
Cap on elderly care bills in England raises questions for Wales
 Elderly care
The Welsh Government has said it will carefully consider the implications for 
Wales of a planned cap on elderly care bills in England.

The £1 billion move across the border, which will spare relatives from paying 
more than £75,000 for an elderly person's care, is expected to be funded by 
dragging more people into inheritance tax.

The move will also extend the number of people who can benefit from Government 
help paying for care by raising the savings limit to more than £120,000.

To the disappointment of many campaigners, the cap will be set at £75,000 - 
more than double the £35,000 recommended by an earlier commission chaired by 
economist Andrew Dilnot.


Alongside the cap, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is to announce a large rise in 
the assets threshold beneath which people receive means-tested support meeting 
care bills. Currently £23,250, that is set to rise to £123,000.

The decisions in England will raise questions for the Welsh Government over how 
it plans to create a long-term sustainable way of paying for the care of 
elderly people without burdening families with the cost.

After the Dilnot Commission report was published in 2011, Wales and Social 
Services Minister Gwenda Thomas called for talks with the UK Government as soon 
as possible.

A Welsh Government spokesman said today that it would study the proposals in 
England in detail.

He said: "We recognise the current arrangements for paying for social care 
areoutdated and need reform.

"While Andrew Dilnot's report relates to England, this is an issue of vital 
importance for people in Wales and the rest of the UK. The Welsh Government has 
a long-standing

commitment to building a new system of paying for social care that is fair, 
affordable and sustainable in the long term.

"We have already introduced a £50 per week cap on charges for home care.

"Paying for care is a complex issue that has profound consequences for many 
people. It will be important to understand the detailed implications for the 
people of Wales of what is being proposed by the UK Government and how they 
will differ from the recommendations that had been made in the Dilnot Report.

"We would need to see the sums in England before doing our own analysis and 
deciding what the best policy on paying for care in Wales should look like.

"There has been extensive consultation on this issue in Wales over a number of 
years including a Green Paper. Over the last nine months we have been 
consulting with key stakeholders in Wales to ascertain what kind of system 
would command broad public support here and whether such reforms should be 
built on the Dilnot proposals.

"A report on the outcome of that will be issued with the next few weeks with a 
Ministerial statement on this important issue."

Westminster Health Minister Jeremy Hunt said the move in England was aimed at 
preventing people from having to sell their homes to pay for their, or their 
partner's care.

He said: The point of what we are doing is to protect peoples inheritance. 
The worst thing that can happen is at the most vulnerable moment in your life 
you lose the thing you worked hard for, that you saved for, your own house.

And what we are trying to do is to be one of the first countries in the world 
which creates a system where people dont have to sell their own house.

To pay for the move, thousands more people will be hit with inheritance tax 
bills because of a three-year extension of the freeze in the £325,000 threshold 
 £650,000 for couples  at which it kicks in at 40%.

Speaking on BBC1s Andrew Marr Show yesterday, Mr Hunt said the current 
situation was a scandal in which 30,000 to 40,000 people a year have to sell 
their houses to pay for their care costs.

Mr Hunt said it would be a fully funded solution and one that would pave the 
way for insurers to provide a system of cover for elderly care.

Finances are very, very much constrained at the moment and the fact that we 
are finding what might be as much as £1 billion a year to do this, shows that 
we want to help those hard-working people who have saved all their life and 
suddenly quite randomly find that their house is at risk, he said.

The National Pensioners Convention (NPC) described the social care reforms as 
about as credible as a Findus Lasagne.

NPC general secretary Dot Gibson said: The social care system needs urgent and 
radical reform, but these proposals simply tinker at the edges.

The current system is dogged by means-testing, a postcode lottery of charges, 
a rationing of services and poor standards and nothing in the plan looks like 
it will address any of these concerns.

Setting a lifetime cap on care costs of £75,000 will help just 10% of those 
needing care, whilst the majority will be left to struggle on with a third rate 
service.

The Government needs to be much braver and bolder if it is really going to 
sort out the problems  otherwise in a few years time well be back again 
having another look at the issue.

Using inheritance tax or money saved from the state pension system simply 
wont raise enough money to bring about the change thats needed.

Shadow care and older peoples minister Liz Kendall said a bigger and bolder 
response was needed.

This would be a small step forward for some people who need residential care 
in five or more years time, she said.

But it wont be fair for people with modest homes. Andrew Dilnot recommended a 
cap on care costs of £35,000 and warned that anything above £50,000 wont 
provide adequate protection for people with low incomes and low wealth.

And these proposals wont do anything for the hundreds of thousands of elderly 
and disabled people who are facing a desperate daily struggle to get the care 
and support they need right now.

The Association of British Insurers (ABI) said the reforms were a potential 
step forward.

Stephen Gay, the ABIs director of life, savings and protection, said: This is 
potentially another positive step forward in tackling the challenges of an 
ageing society. The cap and the higher means test give people greater certainty 
and will enable them to plan ahead for later life.

Town halls said the cap was a positive step but not enough on its own.

David Rogers, chairman of the Local Government Associations community 
wellbeing board, said: A cap will help create more certainty, fairness and, in 
the process, peace of mind.

We need a system that helps families with the cost of care in old age and 
protects them from the heartache of losing their homes to pay for it.

We also need a system that encourages people to plan ahead, both financially 
and through healthy living to help prevent the need for care.

We are concerned that the cap alone  which at £75,000 is considerably higher 
than the independent commissions recommendation of between £25,000 and £50,000 
- wont address these issues.

Mr Rogers added: On its own a cap is not enough to sort out long-term care and 
will mean little if the starting point is a system that is massively 
underfunded and unable to cope with the pressures of our rapidly ageing 
population.

Mr Dilnot said he regretted that the cap had been set at £75,000 but insisted 
it would mean that pensioners no longer had to be terrified of the 
consequences of needing care.

He told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: We said it should be between £25,000 
and £50,000 in 2010/11 prices. The cap that is being proposed is £75,000 we 
think in 2017 prices. Thats the equivalent of £61,000 in our terms, so it is 
higher than we would have wanted  £11,000 higher than the top end of our range 
and I regret that but I recognise that the public finances are in a pretty 
tricky state.

It doesnt seem to me that it is so different from what we wanted as to 
radically transform the basis of the system.

Mr Dilnot said care costs should be bound up in the way people plan for old 
age. He added: I think in the longer run our pension could also be adjusted so 
that if we need care our pension increases very substantially and that I think 
is the biggest way in which the financial services sector will get involved.

He said: At the moment many people find themselves hoarding their quite meagre 
wealth because they are so worried about the worst case. One of my big hopes 
for this system is that there will be lower inheritances in future because 
people, knowing what the worst case is, will now be able to start spending 
their money on their own lives rather than keeping it just in case they need 
lots of care.

The decision to set the cap at £75,000 comes despite extensive briefings to 
newspapers last August that David Cameron and Nick Clegg had agreed they would 
implement the Dilnot recommendations in full  including the proposed £35,000 
cap.

The then health secretary Andrew Lansley had previously indicated that while 
the Government supported the Dilnot plan in principle it could not commit to 
fund it in full because of the parlous state of the public finances.

Todays announcement also means abandoning the Tories general election 
campaign pledge to raise the threshold for inheritance tax to £1 million.

The move was widely credited with reviving the Conservatives fortunes when it 
it was unveiled by George Osborne at the party conference in 2007  forcing 
Gordon Browns disastrous decision to abandon plans for a snap general election.



from
Vanessa The Google Girl.
my skype name is rainbowstar123
[guide.chat] cap on elderly care

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