Labour manifesto: Brown fails to clear up care service funding questions

12 April 2010 12:41 pm | By Tracey Scott

Delivering his party manifesto today, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Labour will push ahead with its plans to reform social care in England but he failed to fully disclose how his proposed National Care Service will be funded.

In a Government white paper last month, Labour said a National Care Service Commission will be set up to establish a fair and sustainable way of funding its plans to offer social care, which will involve a compulsory levy.

However, details of how a full roll-out of the National Care Service will be funded were dodged today.

He said Labour’s plans to offer 400,000 people with the greatest needs free care at home from 2011 will be funded through savings and efficiencies in the health budget and in local government.

He also said that Labour’s plans to cap the costs of residential care so that everyone’s homes and savings are protected from care charges after two years will be funded through Labour’s decision to freeze inheritance tax thresholds until 2014-15. This second phase of reform will also be paid for by more people over the state pension age staying in work and through efficiencies across the NHS and the care system.

But the manifesto says: “The final stage of reform, after 2015, will be a comprehensive National Care Service. At the start of the next Parliament we will establish a commission to reach a consensus on the right way of financing this system. The  commission will determine the options which should be open to individuals so that people  can have choice and flexibility about how they pay and to ensure that the national care service is funded in a fair way.”

Labour says the commission will make recommendations in time for implementation of the third stage of reform after 2015, once these proposals have been put to the public at a general election.

This follows pressure from the Conservative Party who have recently campaigned against one option set out in last year’s green paper, a compulsory levy paid on death to fund care needs.

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