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.