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Taxing retired households to pay for care

The third in a series of guest blogs that we are publishing in the run-up to the launch of the final report from the Commission on the Future of Health and Social Care in England. Each focuses on one of the possible options for funding future health and social care. Here, Andrew Harrop of the Fabian Society argues that retired households should contribute more towards the costs of health and care.

Authors

This is the third and final guest blog that we are publishing in the run-up to the launch of the final report from the Commission on the Future of Health and Social Care in England.

Each blog focuses on one of the possible options for funding future health and social care considered in the commission’s interim report. Here, Andrew Harrop of the Fabian Society argues that retired households should contribute more towards the costs of health and care.

The commission will make its final recommendations on 4 September.

Here’s an £8 billion answer to the health and care funding crisis: ask retired people to pay their fair share. For this sum is the difference between the amount of tax that retired households pay in a year and the amount they would pay if they were not retired. According to ONS figures, in 2012/13 non-retired households with middle incomes paid 35 per cent of their gross income in tax. This compares to the 29 per cent paid by retired households with roughly the same income (after making an adjustment for household size).

It is hard to think of plausible reasons to justify this inequality. It’s not about pensioners being poorer overall: the tax gap is a calculation based on the difference we pay in tax as a share of our income (and anyway the gap isn’t observed between young and old households with very low incomes). Nor can it be justified by differences in wealth: retired households have higher assets than non-retired households on average. If wealth was taken into account and we thought broadly about ‘ability to pay’, the inter-generational tax gap would be even larger.

Instead, the gap is explained in two words: National Insurance. So, with the funding of health and care in crisis and retired households richer than ever, is it time for older people to pay National Insurance on their income? Or, to put it another way, is it time to merge National Insurance and income tax?

But to win the public’s support, the money must be earmarked for retired people’s health and social care. This cannot be just a tax rise, but a solution to a financial crisis facing us all in old age: ‘from older people, to older people’.

Indeed it is only because of history that retired households – those who use the NHS the most – don’t pay National Insurance. In the Beveridge Report of 1942, health care was listed as one of the insured benefits to which National Insurance created entitlement. But from day one, retired people were enrolled into the NHS without being asked to contribute. Back then, there was no way that most pensioners could have afforded to pay - they were too few in number for it to make much difference anyway. Today, the £8 billion gap shows this is now a discrepancy worth worrying about.

The Fabian Society, using the latest ONS data on income, tax and benefits, calculated that you could raise more than £8 billion if you levied National Insurance on older people’s total taxable incomes (including earnings, pensions and investment income). This would treat retired households on roughly the same basis as working households whose income mainly consist of earnings.

To protect those with low incomes it would make sense to introduce a high starting threshold for National Insurance, imitating the coalition’s reforms to income tax. The table below illustrates the impact of a 12 per cent contribution on income over £10,000 in today’s prices. The policy would leave the average retired household paying £23 per week extra: not a terrible membership fee for a world-class health and care system. Better still, the reform would be progressive. Many people in the poorest fifth of retired households would pay nothing, while those in the richest fifth would pay over £70 each week, on average.

The impact of applying National Insurance at 12 per cent to pensioners’ incomes, with a lower threshold of £10,000 per year

Income quintile of retired households

Poorest

2

3

4

Richest

Average

Income range of quintile (assuming 2 person family)

under £14,400

£14,400 to £17,600

£17,600 to £21,600

£21,600 to £28,800

over £28,800

-

Average National Insurance payable per week

£0

£6

£12

£28

£71

£23

Source: The effects of taxes and benefits on household income 2012/13, ONS, 2014; author’s calculations

This could all be phased in over time. For example, in each Budget in the next parliament, the chancellor could cut National Insurance employee and self-employed contributions by two pence in the pound and increase the basic rate of income tax by the same amount. National Insurance would wither on the vine and income tax would rise to take its place.

The main objection to the whole idea is political: would anyone dare to take on the grey vote? It would take a skilful politician to sell this as a ‘something for something’ deal, not a tax raid on the nation’s grannies. But every penny would go to pay for health and care in our long retirements.

What are the alternatives? Ever deeper cuts to other hard pressed public services? A lottery where some older people pay huge sums themselves? A hike on National Insurance for workers, whose incomes have stalled for a decade, unlike those of older people? A death tax, which the truly rich can always evade?

No tax rise is an easy sell, but this has one great advantage: it is fair.

Andrew Harrop is General Secretary of the Fabian Society, Britain’s oldest political think-tank.

This is a guest blog post. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of The King’s Fund.