Labour Never Loved The Idea Of A Cap On Care Costs - Now It Must Decide What To Do Instead

15th September 2024

The decision to cancel the cap on social care costs, announced by Rachel Reeves on 29 July, is a case of a government abandoning a policy it never loved and to which it was never really committed.

The policy was created by the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government in 2014 but implementation was repeatedly postponed by successive governments, most recently until October 2025. Implementation of the policy was pointedly not included in the Labour manifesto in 2024, and got no more than lukewarm support during the election campaign by the then Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting.

So for the incoming government, with an apparent £22 billion financial black hole to fill, the decision to jettison the policy's initial £1 billion cost in 2025/26 cannot have taken long to reach.

The question is: what now? The government has said it will ‘grip' the crisis in social care and doing that means tackling the fundamental issue - the widening gap between the population's need for support and the availability of publicly funded care.

[url=https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/blogs/labour-cap-on-care-costs]Read the full article HERE/url]

In Scotland, the threshold for paying for care home accommodation is £35,000. You need to have capital below £21,500 to be eligible for maximum support. In Scotland if you are eligible for personal care, this will be paid for by your local council.3