Giving proper consideration to making appropriate provision for future care is therefore essential. Prior to the release of the government’s own paper on health and social care reform, St. James’s Place produced a social care report outlining a number of innovations and ideas that could help to create a better, more integrated system to tackling social care issues.
These include measures such as granting additional tax benefits on payments from existing pension arrangements to fund care, and utilising private care insurance, with contributions based upon a combination of age, health, family history and level of benefit purchased.
These could not only help spread the costs more widely across society and move some of the risk to the private sector, but also raise public awareness of the need to prepare for social care expenses.
Clearly, there is no immediate or perfect solution, but sadly the problem is not going away. We hope it is given serious thought soon.
Tony Mudd is divisional director for development and technical consultancy at St James’s Place
