Today’s report urged the Department of Health and Social Care to assess the impact of its planned shake-up on town halls and set out how it plans to fund the overhaul. Mean testing would also become more generous.

Last year, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt confirmed that social care charging reforms which had been promised by Boris Johnson would be delayed for two years to 2025, including an £86,000 cap on the amount people would pay for their own care. What's left of the Government's care reform programme now is still of some value but it's hard to see it doing more than forming a foundation on which the next government can build.”

“The political will for care reform that Boris Johnson briefly offered as PM turned out to be illusory and under his successors the opportunity to make life better for everyone who needs social care - and all those who work so hard to provide it - has been allowed largely to shrink away.

That extra cash was sorely needed and without it councils can do little more than firefight as they try to meet soaring levels of need with totally inadequate resources.

He added: “This NAO report is a damning indictment of the failure of the Conservatives to get to grips with the social care crisis - they even shelved the modest reforms they had announced.”Īge UK charity director Caroline Abrahams said: “With inflation continuing to raise the cost of delivering care, the last thing we needed was for more than a billion pounds of the Government money that had been earmarked to support care reform being spirited away. Fight to give carers NHS pay levels moves to No10 as campaign intensifiesĭennis Reed, director of the Silver Voices campaign group, said it was “hardly surprising that so many older people are filling hospital beds unnecessarily, when local authorities have no funds to provide social care support so that they can live with dignity in their own homes”.

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