Not absolutely everything in last week’s budget was wrong. But one thing it got right was met with an avalanche of anger. The government abandoned a decade-long promise to preserve the assets of better-off people who have to pay for their own social care in England. The pledge to set a cap of £86,000 as the maximum anyone should pay has been delayed yet again, notionally until after the election, which effectively means the policy is dead. At this time, it must surely be right not to spend billions on protecting the wealth of better-off people when so many are being denied any care at all. Yet again, how to pay for social care proves to be a political landmine.
How to pay for care is the same wicked issue that contributed to Labour’s 2010 defeat and blew up under Theresa May’s ill-fated 2017 general election campaign. To borrow her notorious phrase as she U-turned on this, “Nothing has changed”, because the same old unresolved social care conundrum is as politically toxic as ever. But with every year that passes without a solution, the crisis deepens.
