Long-awaited changes designed to protect individuals from having to sell their homes to meet large social care bills must be further delayed because of funding and staffing shortages, the leaders of England’s largest councils have said.
Plans to introduce a cap on social care costs – which would limit people’s lifetime care cost contributions to a maximum of £86,000 – in October 2025 will be impossible to deliver, the County Councils Network (CCN) said.
It called on the health and social care secretary, Wes Streeting, to urgently decide whether to push ahead with the cap, warning that to do so without a multibillion-pound cash injection would lead to some councils in effect being pushed into bankruptcy.
“To put it bluntly, it will be impossible to implement these reforms next autumn in the current timescales and with no funding committed to the reforms,” said Martin Tett, the adult social care spokesperson for the CCN.
The warning presents yet another challenge for the new government, which has said it wants to tackle the social care crisis as part of its wider ambitions to rebuild public services but which so far has offered little in the way of concrete proposals.
Councils are struggling to hire enough care workers, with the latest Skills for Care workforce data published this week revealing that 131,000 care jobs were unfilled. Skills for Care predicts that more than 400,000 extra staff will have to be recruited over the next decade to meet demand.
The cap was adopted by Boris Johnson as prime minister in 2021 to meet a 2019 manifesto promise that pensioners would not have to sell homes to fund care costs in old age. It raised the amount of assets a person can have before getting state funding for social care from £23,250 to £100,000 and capped lifetime care costs at £86,000.
However, a year later the government postponed the cap’s introduction to 2025 because of funding concerns. At the time, the then shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, now the chancellor, called the postponement “another broken promise after 12 years of Tory failure on social care”.
The £1.7bn set aside to fund the changes was reallocated to meet councils’ day-to-day social care running costs. Councils say this has enabled them to “keep the show on the road” amid rising inflation and demand for care, and say taking it back would lead to services being cut and push many councils in effect into bankruptcy.
A further delay on introducing the cap, designed by the economist Andrew Dilnot, would disappoint campaigners concerned that once again reform of adult social care was being pushed into the long grass by politicians.
Although Streeting suggested during the election campaign that Labour was committed to a 2025 introduction of the care costs cap – saying “that’s the plan as things stand” – it was not part of the party’s manifesto, and ministers have so far suggested economic growth and housing are the immediate priorities.
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Tett said: “We have always supported the principles of the reforms as they will make the system fairer. But if the government is to proceed with the reforms then it must delay them by at least a year, but likely more, reassess the real costs and set out a way to fully fund them.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We know that people are suffering without the care they need and we are committed to ensuring everyone lives an independent, dignified life.
“We are going to grip the social care crisis, starting with the workforce by delivering a new deal for care workers.
“We will also take steps to create a National Care Service underpinned by national standards, delivering consistency of care across the country.”
