Social care proposals risk abandoning the poorest pensioners in the UK, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has warned.

It is widely anticipated that the Coalition will soon implement a £75,000 cap on how much people pay towards their care costs. The scheme will cost around £3.5 billion over the life of a Parliament. Economist Andrew Dilnot originally put forward the idea of a limit, but suggested it should be set much lower at between £25,000 and £50,000.

But the CSJ has said the cap will do nothing to end the failure of care standards in the current system.

Christian Guy, Managing Director of the CSJ, said: “The current social care crisis cannot be leap-frogged. With money so tight, people delivering care services can think of many better ways to spend the £3.5 billion that is about to be invested in these proposals. 

“The CSJ has spent years studying the social care system in the UK and these plans will not improve the lives of our poorest pensioners who are already receiving sub-standard care. Surely helping the most disadvantaged must be the starting point for any reforms.”

To illustrate its argument, the CSJ published a checklist outlining a number of major failures in the current care system. The CSJ – which last year published Transforming Social Care for the Poorest Older People – issued the following statement, which was reported by the Press Association.

Click here to read CSJ senior researcher Dr James Mumford's blog on why the reforms miss the point.

The Government must start tackling the root causes of social breakdown if it wants to launch a credible assault on poverty, the CSJ has said.

Writing for the latest issue of Total Politics, Christian Guy welcomed a consultation – largely inspired by CSJ evidence – exploring whether the definition of poverty in the UK needs to be widened to look at factors that fuel social breakdown.

The Government has said that people’s income should remain a ‘key indicator’ in any definition of poverty. But it is consulting on whether other issues – such as: family breakdown, educational failure, debt, addiction and worklessness – should also be taken into consideration. The CSJ called for this in its paper Rethinking Child Poverty.

Christian also took part in a debate at the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Poverty, where he said: “If a sensible and much more intelligent measure of poverty can be agreed, it would be one of the most important things any government has achieved in generations. 

"Think of what could be transformed if this Government and future governments became fully focused on dismantling the root causes of poverty.”

A cross-party partnership is crucial to halting the spread of gang violence across British communities, the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats said at a CSJ event.

Simon Hughes MP told a packed conference, hosted in partnership with urban youth charity XLP, that party politics cannot be allowed to block efforts needed to tackle gang culture.

Other speakers included Labour’s David Lammy MP, Chief Superintendent John Sutherland and Gracia McGrath, the CEO of Chance UK.

The audience heard how a failure to get to grips with the root causes of violence has allowed gangs to blight communities across the UK.

The event came just months after the CSJ published Time to Wake Up, a widely-reported paper that called for greater intervention and prevention.

The conference was covered by the BBC, ITV, the Daily Express and Evening Standard.

Click here to read the speech Christian Guy delivered at the event.