Elderly care reforms are 'morally dubious'

In a bid to avoid alienating older voters and tackle the rapidly rising cost of long-term elderly care, the government has announced a £75,000 cap on care costs. But, asks Tim Bennett, is that the right thing to do?

Britain's old-age care system is "a shop with no prices" only suitable for the "very, very wealthy", as economist and former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies Andrew Dilnot puts it. So in a bid to win over the grey vote and tackle the rapidly rising cost of long-term care in old age, the government has announced that from April 2017 you will only pay the first £75,000 of care costs, after which the state will step in. Meanwhile, the means-tested asset threshold, up to which people are spared the full costs of care, will rise from £23,250 to £123,000.

While we should welcome any simplification of the care system, Dot Gibson, general secretary of lobby group the National Pensioners Convention, has a point when she says in The Daily Telegraph that "the plan as it stands is about as credible as a Findus lasagne" though not perhaps for the reasons that Gibson thinks.

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.