Research reveals £35k care cap would cost £3.6bn

New research has revealed that a £35,000 lifetime cap on care costs for older people would cost £3.6bn by 2035.

The Nuffield Foundation funded research was carried out by the Pension Policy Institute, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of East Anglia.

Associate Professorial Research Fellow Raphael Wittenberg, from the LSE, said: “How best to reform the system of financing social care has proved a challenge for successive governments.

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“There are difficult trade-offs to address. How far should additional resources be focused on relaxing the means test to help people with substantial care needs who because of the means test currently fund their own care?

“And how far should they be focused on people with limited resources who currently do not receive publicly funded care because their needs are not assessed as sufficiently substantial to meet the eligibility criteria? In order to inform decisions we have examined in detail the likely impacts of a range of potential reforms.”

The report cited the Dilnot Commission’s recommendation of a £35,000 care costs cap in 2011.

The research also investigated previous Government plans to introduce a £72,000 cap on care costs  in 2020.