Social Care Funding (EAC Report)

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a fine report. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, will forgive me if I concentrate my remarks on the recommendation with which I profoundly disagree, which is that of free personal care introduced over the next five years, so that it is universally available by 2025-26. I can at least claim to be consistent on this, because I signed a minority to the report to the royal commission saying so.

Why? It is bloody expensive—£7 billion. That is the same amount as is said to be needed to be put into the present system to make it workable. I would prefer to see this money devoted to better care for the less well-off. It would inflate demand. In Scotland, the demand for care in people’s homes doubled when free personal care was introduced. Speaking now as a socialist—if that is allowed—56% of people in need of care, more than half, are paid for by the state already. The £7 billion I have talked about would all go to the remaining 44%, most of them not rich people, but comfortably off. It seems an extraordinary proposition that the state should pick the pockets of the less well-off to subsidise the better off.

The weepy old argument drummed up to whip up support for free care is that people are forced to sell their homes to pay for it. This is simply not the case. First, if you are getting care at home or go into a care home leaving a dependant in your house, the value of the house is excluded from the means test, so you are not forced to sell because you need the money.

Secondly, anyone who does not want to sell can go to the local authority and borrow the money, which is repaid after their death. They do not have to sell their home during their lifetime.

Thirdly—this has been referred to—there is an alternative route for most homeowners that does not involve the state at all. You take out an equity mortgage on your house and use the proceeds to buy an immediate-needs insurance policy, which will go on paying your care home fees for as long as you live—problem solved. L&G, which is the most progressive company, recently went into this market offering increasingly innovative policies. They solve most of the problems that we are worried about with older people having to pay for care.

Finally, and more consensually, I strongly endorse the committee’s emphasis on the need for consensus. It has been tried before, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, was saying. First, the Tories branded Labour’s proposals a “death tax”. Secondly, Labour branded the Tories’ proposals a “dementia tax”. This is no way to do business.

I would like to make a positive proposal for how to stop it. You need not exactly a chairman but an appointed neutral mediator, who tries to find common ground between the parties. The great advantage of that, and I have had personal experience of this, is that, if one party or the other tries to get off the agenda and seize party-political advantage by sabotaging the talks, the mediator can call out the offender. I am hopeful that, if you had talks with such a mediator, you could produce a system that, more or less, satisfies everyone.