Caring Choices - Who will pay for long-term care?

We’re living longer, and as our population ages, demand for long-term care both at home and in residential settings is growing. By 2050 there will be twice as many people aged over 85 as there are now, and current estimates are that we will need to spend four times what we do now on long-term care.

In April 2006, the King’s Fund published Securing Good Care for Older People: Taking a long-term view, the final report of Sir Derek Wanless’s review of spending requirements for social care for older people over the next 20 years.

The report identified significant shortcomings in the present system of funding, which is built on means-tested benefits and tends to help only those with the greatest needs.

It calculated that simply keeping pace with the growing numbers of older people would require total spending on social care for older people to increase from its 2002 level of £10.1 billion (1.1 per cent of gross domestic product) to £24.0 billion (1.5 per cent of GDP) by 2026.

It also proposed a ‘partnership’ model of funding, combining public and individual finance.

The Wanless report helped to raise the profile of the subject, but it is vital that momentum is kept up.

To do this, the King’s Fund, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Help the Aged and Age Concern, with 11 other organisations, set up a national initiative to explore the options for reform and to start to build a consensus about the way forward.

Through an interactive website – and a series of events across England and Scotland – we asked older people, carers and individuals working in long-term care to consider strategies for better care and give their views on how it could be funded in a way that is fair and equitable. This work fed into a final report, The Future of Care Funding: Time for a change.

Reports of the discussions at events, as well as opinion pieces by experts on long-term care, are presented on the Caring Choices website.

• Download the final report from Caring Choices: The Future of Care Funding

• Visit the government consultation website