The government has consistently stated that "no one should have to sell their home to pay for their care". In consequence, this reform predominantly focuses on the political aspect of financing care reform, with changes being made to the way in which individual’s contribution to their care costs will be calculated.
The headline news is that a person’s contribution to the cost of their care will be capped at £86,000 from October 2023. There are also changes to the amount a person can have in assets before they have to contribute to their care costs.
The limit below which you make no contribution will rise from £14,250 to £20,000 and the amount after which a person has to pay all of their care costs rises from £23,250 to £100,000 (partial contributions will apply to the amount in between these figures).
All of this seems, at first sight, to be very good news and in some ways it is, but as always the devil is indeed in the detail, much of which has not yet been disclosed.
Not-so-radical plans
There are aspects of this reform that make it less of a radical change than it at first appears.
Importantly, the £86,000 only applies to the actual costs of 'personal care’ itself. For residential care, fees include both this personal care element and the accommodation costs. Currently these are not split out as separate costs.
Many clients will therefore be paying a lot more than £86,000 before the cap is reached as they will continue to pay the accommodation costs and these will not be included in their cap.
Exact details of the costings split are not available yet, but residents may well have to pay more than double the £86,000 cap before the local authority steps in. The regulations around this are still to be consulted on.
Of equal importance is the fact that the cap will only apply to ‘eligible needs', as local authority funding already does now.
This means that not all care costs will count towards this £86,000, but only those a local authority has assessed your client as needing.
A criticism of the eligibility criteria is that the bar is set very high and there is significant unmet need among people needing care.
In February 2020, Age UK identified that 23 per cent of care requests were rejected on the grounds that the applicant failed to meet the eligibility criteria – equivalent of 80 people per hour.
