The Dilnot Commission may have come up with a workable solution to the adult social care problem but, as Peter Barnett explains, it has to get past the politician.
WRITING A HAPPY ENDING
On the positive side, an achievable timetable has been set which hopefully, the political imperative permitting, will culminate in a White Paper by next spring at the latest.
In the meantime, all interested parties will hopefully engage in the ‘working group’ that has been proposed to consider how to enable the development of an effective market.
Overall, then, a window of opportunity for financial services has opened, but plainly some challenging communication, advice, market segmentation, and product structure and margin issues will have to be resolved before any product or service channels emerge.
The CII’s view that the new funding model should help to close the perception gap by fixing the maximum amount that people will have to pay towards their own care is correct.
Enclosing it within an envelope of advice and education should improve engagement, awareness of personal responsibility and trust while reducing complexity and bringing certainty.
But nothing will happen until 2014-15 at the earliest.
In the meantime, 150,000 older people will enter the care system per year of whom 40% will be self-funders many of whom will continue to deplete their capital.
And just like their forebears, they and their carers or relatives will continue to struggle with the complexities of the current system and the ever tightening restrictions on access to care all of which lead to confusion, loss of dignity and a feeling of great helplessness and unfairness.
Importantly, older individuals should not wait but seek advice now as to how these changes could impact for better or worse their health and financial outcomes in old age.
Informed advice is now needed more than ever and one thing the government could do is get the messaging right and explicitly give support to existing advice vehicles such as Paying for Care, First Stop and the Society of Later Life Advisers.
What we need now is courageous statesmanship from our leaders. Let’s hope that some honesty with the public accompanied by some hard action emerges from Whitehall, rather than more empty rhetoric along the lines of another of the characters in Alice (Humpty Dumpty) who, when he uses a word, “means just what he chooses it to mean – neither more nor less.”
The time has come for deeds rather than words. We had a Royal Commission on this issue 12 years ago and endless reports have been churned out at regular intervals since then.
It is high time that the talking stopped because, as a more modern literary character, Sir Humphrey Appleby, told us in his ‘Law of Inverse Relevance’:
“The less you intend to do about something, the more you have to keep talking about it.”
Peter Barnett is a policy adviser in the House of Lords, an advisory board member of the Society of Later Life Advisers, and chair of the Continuing Care Conference.
