Jeremy Hunt set to delay social care reforms to help fix UK public finances

A plan to limit the amount an individual in England would have to pay towards personal social care, due to take effect next year, will be delayed for at least two more years as chancellor Jeremy Hunt seeks to fill a £55bn fiscal hole in next week’s Autumn Statement.

The decision means yet another delay to the policy, which has been on the statute book since 2014 and is judged by experts to be key to addressing the risk of an individual facing catastrophic care costs. It was last year readopted by Boris Johnson’s government as part of his much-vaunted claim to have “fixed” social care.

However, people familiar with discussions said prime minister Rishi Sunak had never favoured the policy while serving as Johnson’s chancellor.

Sunak’s reluctance was part of the reason he pressed for the introduction of a national insurance rise — axed by Liz Truss’s government — to fund it, keen that Johnson be closely tied to the pledge’s fiscal implications.

As chair of the House of Commons health select committee, Hunt championed the cap, which under the current plan would stand at £86,000. But while a final decision has yet to be taken, he is now thought to have accepted the need for a pause, according to government officials.

Sunak and Hunt need to find an additional £55bn for the public finances, split between spending cuts and tax rises ahead of the Autumn Statement on November 17. Postponing the cap for two years would save an estimated £1bn in the first year, rising eventually to £3bn a year if the policy was scrapped.

A two-year delay would mean the policy would not take effect before the next general election, when a new spending review period would begin. Any incoming Labour administration would then face a challenge over how to fund it.

Health and social care experts voiced concern that the delay, first reported by The Times, would in effect sound the death knell for the policy, adding that the future of a more generous approach to means-tested help, also due to be introduced next year, was uncertain.

Economist Sir Andrew Dilnot, the original architect of the reforms, said he would be “genuinely astonished if the government were to backtrack in this way” because both Sunak and Hunt “have repeatedly said that they’re going to be protecting the most vulnerable”.

He added that any delay “would be a cruel, cruel breach of [the manifesto] promise” made by the Conservatives in 2019 and would not significantly contribute to stabilising the public finances.

Natasha Curry, deputy director of policy at the Nuffield Trust, a think-tank, pointed to the scale of the crisis in social care, where about 10 per cent of posts are vacant. She said a delay risked “losing the momentum that we’re building around potentially more significant reforms in the future to put social care on a more stable footing”.

Simon Bottery, senior fellow in social care at the King’s Fund, another think-tank, said the “huge concern is that if we do delay the cap . . . history tells us that there’s a real risk that a delay becomes essentially an abandonment”.

The Treasury declined to comment.