Commenting on the Government’s social care reform proposals. DR UK’s Fazilet Hadi said: “We are glad to see the Government is making efforts to fix the social care crisis, but remain concerned that the proposals, announced this week along with plans to fix the pandemic backlogs in the NHS are aiming to deliver too little, too late.
“We are concerned that the national conversation is still almost exclusively about Older People, despite a third of people using Social Care being Disabled people of working age, and using two thirds of the overall social care budget. Further, thresholds for Social Care, which are not always based around finances, are so high that around half of all applications to Local Authorities by Disabled people in need of care are turned down.
“The proposed measures do not kick in for another two years. They may not be enough to cover care costs, they may still rely on those with minimal assets having to contribute to care costs, and they do not cover the vastly greater accommodation or food costs, known as hotel costs, for Disabled people in residential care.
We also believe it is the wrong mechanism to use National Insurance contributions instead of Income Tax.”
Read more on the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Times (some paywalls may apply). Read some background on social care at The King’s Fund. Read Kamran Mallick’s blog on the subject.