Social care

Ministers will have to make unpopular decisions on taxation to raise health service funding, says Thomas Pope of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

How should we fund social care? When you try to answer such a big question, you quickly realise there are a whole host of underlying questions one needs to think about.

Recent IFS work (joint with the Health Foundation) documented the considerable pressures on health and social care spending over the next fifteen years. In the near term, an announced funding settlement for the NHS covering the next few years may be on the horizon.

Over the past 50 years we’ve pulled off a pretty remarkable trick. We have spent an ever growing fraction of our national income on the welfare state in general, and on health in particular, without apparently having to pay for it. The tax burden, at about 34 per cent of GDP, is not substantially higher now than it was half a century ago. The same is true of total government spending. As a fraction of national income it’s much the same as it was in the mid-1960s.

This article by Paul Johnson, published in the Times Newspaper, looks at the issue of hypothecating taxes for the NHS.

Maternity units in England operate at 100% capacity much of the time. When capacity is breached, units may occasionally have to close temporarily to new admissions, causing stress to women in labour and undermining their choice over where to have their babies. New work by IFS unpicks some of the causes of closures.

Yesterday, the Conservative Party proposed changes to the rules governing who is eligible for government funding for social care, and backed away from a lifetime cap on care costs. In this observation, we discuss those changes and lay out their potential effects. Taking the population of people in their 70s in England we estimate that, on becoming in need of care in their own home, 12-17% would be eligible for state support under current rules but would not be eligible under the new rules proposed by the Conservatives. Others would find they needed to use more of their own wealth to fund the costs of care in their home before the state stepped in.

IFS Director Paul Johnson writes in The Times.

This article about social care spending was published in Prospect Magazine

Earlier this month the chancellor announced £2bn of new funding for social care in England, to be spread over three years: 2017-18 to 2019-20.

Funding for adult social care is currently a hot topic. The number of older individuals is forecast to increase sharply over the next two decades. However, the extent to which this places pressure on social care budgets could potentially be offset by reductions in the needs of older people over time, and in the increased availability of informal care due to the growing prevalence of partners at older ages. New evidence published today suggests that although there is some evidence of reduced needs across successive birth cohorts, this will do little to offset the increased demand for formal care arising from demographic pressures.