How self funders have been treated so far!
So all our hopes for the ‘cap’ have gone now that it has
been announced that it will not be implemented. I refer to the ‘cap’ which was
our hope, as self funders, for an official, legal cap on the amount of funding
we had to pay for social care so that we could all plan for the future and make
sure we had enough funding for our needs before we could expect the state to
take over. Of course we are in a privileged position to have sufficient to be
able to pay for our own care and can’t expect the sympathy that people with no
funding are entitled to when they cannot get the support they need on a day to
day basis. However, it is just another example of how the social care system is
not being comprehensively planned with everyone’s needs in mind and many of us
don’t have an infinite amount to spend.
First, it was enshrined in the Care Act 2014 legislation
that a cap would be introduced in April 2017 with the limit set and it seemed
like just another part of the legislation to be implemented in time. However as
time went on there were rumblings that the social care agenda was now so
overwhelming there would be no social workers with time to do the initial
assessments necessary to have a clear understanding of spending on need up to
the cap. Without such an exercise there was no benchmark from which to begin
measuring the cap and expenditure of each self funder. We were quietly told the
‘cap’s’ implementation would be delayed.
Then, earlier in the year, we had the debacle of the
‘dementia tax’ leading up to the last election. This was so confused in the way
it was reported that it was not clear that the ‘cap’ would be abolished along with
the Tory’s plans. It became a party political issue but somewhere in the mix
was the idea of the original cap and the chance of a limit for individuals who
are self funders on social care spending even if there was not the clarity of
thought of the earlier legislation.
To add to the irony, self funders of residential care are
finding they are subsidising the residential fee rates of those paid for by
local councils because of the constraints on local authority expenditure and
their failure to raise their rates for care home places in line with costs. What
justification is there for this? Self funders are paying higher fees for care
home places as local authorities will not increase the payment of fees in line
with increased costs to care home owners!
Now the ‘cap’ has been abandoned for good and quietly
dropped because of the insufficiency of social workers for that initial
assessment. So there has been a false trail for those of us trying to plan long
term social care needs costs! And we are left with the worry and uncertainty of
knowing if our saved funding will be enough for all our long term care. Meanwhile, we have all been left with the
offer of a social care advisory paper which may or may not mention the ‘cap’.
Our only hope is that Andrew Dilnott, who designed the original ‘cap’ policy,
is to be one of the advisory committee members.
Clare Evans MBE, Disability Equality and Social Care
Consultant