Winston Churchill had a name for it. ‘Happy thoughts’ was his description of policy proposals that gave the proposer a warm feeling but were unfeasible, unaffordable or for other reasons no more than desiderata.
Our new prime minister offers a master-class in this method of spreading happiness. And foremost among Andy Burnham’s now almost daily exercise in sharing his desiderata are his suggestions – surely too vague to be proposals – for a new system of universal social care for the elderly, free at the point of use.
To the extent that the idea has any discernible shape at all, it seems that a sister-body to the National Health Service might be set up to meet and administer this massive new entitlement.
Why do today’s offspring think it a basic human right to get their parents’ house when the parents die?
I will not bore you with the unanswered questions and potential difficulties this poses. Those with more expertise in the field will be doing that soon enough. Treasury officials are probably already assembling for the new Chancellor, John Healey, all the reasons why what, in Yes, Prime Minister, would have been described by civil servants as a ‘brave’ idea, is headed for the very, very long grass. Anything with a cost (once up and running) calculated to be £18-20 billion a year will remain out of the question for our Chancellor for the rest of his political lifetime. Mr Healey is 66.
Instead, then, I’d like to take Mr Burnham at his word, at least, on his principled reasons for wanting a free-at-the-point-of-use entitlement to social care. I think he’s sincere. He is not alone in disliking the fact that elderly people in need of residential social care should often have to pay for this out of lifetime savings (or the disposal of assets such as their houses). This has been described by critics, including Burnham, as a ‘dementia tax’; and the term is believed to have helped scupper Theresa May’s 2017 general election campaign.
First, something of a riddle. Why would a left-wing prime minister want a ‘reform’ whose potential value to voters increases in line with their wealth, and which promises no financial benefits at all to the poorest? At present, only if you have assets of more than £23,250 do you start having to pay for your own social care. So only if and when your social care bills diminish your assets to less than £23,250, can you begin to claim. The elderly rich pay today for longest – often until death. This strikes me as fair. But under the Burnham plan (so far as we can discern) the asset-rich keep their assets while the state looks after them. They never have to contribute.
Benefits available to all, regardless of financial need, are an inefficient way of welfare spending: money effectively spent on those who do not need it.
Which brings me to that value-freighted little word, ‘need’. Those moving into residential care, whether or not suffering from dementia, do not ‘need’ their houses any longer. It might be nice for them to know they still own a house; and it’s not uncommon for adult children to be using it before their parents have left. But these are now arrangements that do not affect them. They have a new roof over their head: an institutional one. They’re secure.
So why the caterwauling about a ‘dementia tax’ let alone a ‘death tax’? The elderly are very much alive. The state has no plans to take so much as a penny from them. They’ll be looked after until they die. What, then, is the problem?
Reader, you know the answer. The caterwauling is not about the needs of the elderly person. It is about the financial expectations of their children or, if childless, their next of kin. The English middle and upper-middle classes have come to believe that they are entitled to inherit from their elderly relatives: and their most substantial likely inheritance is bricks and mortar. The legator may well have been looked after until death, but what about the legatee?
I cannot for the life of me understand how this sense of entitlement has arisen. It’s nice that my parents left their house to their children (though as there were six of us that wasn’t a fortune), but as far as I’m concerned they could have left the proceeds of sale to a cats’ home if they wished. It would have been no business of mine. We their children might hope but had no right to expect. So why do today’s offspring seem to think it a basic human right to get their parents’ house when the parents die?
This, not the interests of the parent, is the undeclared wellspring of resistance to any scheme to spend tomorrow’s value of an elderly person’s property on their care and comfort today. Offspring are using their frail and often unknowing parents as glove-puppets in a campaign for the state – the general taxpayer – to pay for their parents’ residential care, leaving the payout to themselves untouched. I find the hypocrisy disgusting.
Most disgusting of all is the sly argument that canny legatees (aware of the selfishness of their case) have started to make: that elderly people are comforted in the autumn of their years by the knowledge that the assets they have amassed during their lifetimes will go to their inheritors. Doubtless in some cases that’s true. Well diddums. Our fellow citizens should be disabused of the idea that everything they’ve put away can be protected against debt they may later incur for social care. Debt they incur for social care should be no different from any other debt they incur – and set against their estate.
Any number of arrangements, existing or proposed, can or could be made for an elderly person to keep their own home until they die, advancing the cost of their social care against the posthumous disposal of the asset. Objections on humanitarian grounds are bogus. Honest politicians should call it out, and honest journalists should stop sidling past the truth.
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