Age UK comment on delays to care cap

Age UK comment on care cap being postponed until 2020

Caroline Abrahams, Charity Director for Age UK, said:

'The Government is right to delay implementing the cap on care costs as the top priority must be to stop the social care system that millions of older people depend on from collapsing in its entirety. At the moment there are growing concerns that the social care system is in a cataclysmic state of decline and unsustainable on its current basis. From this point of view introducing the care cap would have been a distraction.

'What matters now is that the Government grasps the scale of the galloping crisis in social care and uses the Spending Review to bring forward effective solutions, which must include significant investment to fill the funding gap that is at the heart of the system's difficulties. The clock is ticking.

'Meanwhile, there is a continuing need to protect older people from the risk of endlessly spiralling care costs: that problem which the Dilnot Commission was convened to address has not gone away. However, the version of the cap the Government wanted to bring in was set too high. If there is to be a cap on costs in future, as Age UK hopes, it must be fit for purpose and worthy of the name.'

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