General Article How will you pay £1,000 a week for old-age care?

Topic Selected: Ageing Book Volume: 378

Proposals to hike taxes for the over 40s for old-age care highlight massive gaps in knowledge and cash.

By Kate Hughes

It has been pushed into the political long grass for decades but finally, like so many things in life, Covid-19 has made the UK’s broken social care system an urgent problem that needs solving right now.

This week it emerged that the government was considering yet another new approach to the long-term care funding crisis – taxing the over 40s more through the National Insurance system.

Other options on the table include making some form of long-term insurance policy mandatory.

These are the latest in a long history of controversial options considered over the years, including the so-called “dementia tax” and earlier “death tax” that have been floated by governments and then gunned down by opposition parties as the social funding chasm gets ever wider.

Local authorities spent more than £22bn on social care in 2018-19, which may sound substantial but is less than the ...

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