Woman at risk of losing home calls social care

A woman at risk of selling her home to support her husband’s care has said she is “sickened” by the chancellor’s plans to delay a cap on care costs.

Paula Conner, 75, told the BBC she pays £1,200 a week for a care home for her husband Mick, 89, who has dementia.

A cap to limit lifetime care costs in England at £86,000 had been due to come into effect in October 2023, but has been delayed by two years.

“I don’t know what will happen to my husband now,” Mrs Conner told the BBC.

To meet the high cost of keeping her husband in care “I may have to sell my home”, she said.

“When we moved house, I bought this house, and Mick, all his funds were going into investment. So that if anything happened to him, obviously he’s 14 years older than me, then there’d be money there for me to live off.”

But with fees of more than £62,000 a year, Mick’s savings “won’t last more than two years at the most”.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said money to support the cap will instead be given to councils “to deliver an estimated 200,000 more care packages over the next two years”.

“That’s the biggest increase in funding under any government, of any colour, in history,” he said in his Autumn Statement on Thursday.

He later told the BBC the delay in introducing the cap was “a source of great regret” but it meant there could be more funding for social care.

Mr Hunt added that he believed the cap would be brought in if the Conservatives won the next general election.

Mr and Mrs Conner were once well-liked members of the East Yorkshire farming community, keen to help others and hosting annual Christmas parties.

But Mr Conner now lives in a Bridlington care home where dementia has made him “barely recognisable”, says Mrs Conner.

After being admitted to hospital in March, struggling to breathe, Mr Conner’s mental capacity declined sharply.

Mrs Conner said she struggled to find a home able to cater for his needs, but believes her husband would be “aghast” if he knew the cost.

“He’d be so upset that, for all his hard work and how frugal he’s been, it is just going on something like this,” she said.

News of the cap being delayed has hit her hard: “We’ve grafted all our lives for this. It sickens me.”

Mrs Conner says most of the homes she looked at were “dumps” and “absolutely atrocious and quite unsafe”.

“That frightened me and there was no way I was going to let Mick go there,” she said.

“I don’t know what will happen to my husband now. Will he end up somewhere I don’t want him to be?”

Currently most people in England who have savings or assets of more than £23,250 pay for all the care they need at home or in a care home.

Planned reforms would also have increased this means-tested threshold to £100,000, allowing people to keep much more of their money.

Sir Andrew Dilnot, who devised the policy more than a decade ago, called the delay “extraordinarily disappointing”.

Sir Andrew first proposed it in 2011 to David Cameron’s government following a year long investigation into funding of care and support.

This is the second time the care cap has been delayed. It was due to be introduced in 2015 when Jeremy Hunt was health and social care secretary, but was pushed back because of funding and staffing pressures on the care system.

The need for reform in social care is “critical and urgent”, Sir Andrew said.

England’s county councils had urged the government to push back the start date of the cap, warning of serious staffing and financial pressures on services.

The Local Government Association welcomed the delay, but said the funding “falls significantly short of the £13bn we have called for” to support social care services.

Labour’s shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, described the announcement of a delay as “another broken promise after 12 years of Tory failure on social care”.

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