Care home owners will be keeping a close eye on whether Baroness Louise Casey chooses to recommend an insurance system for social care after Wes Streeting trailed the idea earlier this week.
Baroness Casey will chair an independent commission into social care reform from April — although long-term recommendations won’t be made public until 2028 at the earliest.
But in response to how social care could be funded in the future, Streeting told Times Radio that ‘[insurance would] be one of many, many options and that’s why I think it’s genuinely worth Louise Casey looking into those options’.
Back in 2019 a House Of Lords committee published an interim report into social care funding and made suggestions based on mandatory social insurance or voluntary private insurance.
Both approaches could provide the care home sector with longer term financial stability and enable families to plan for a more secure future.
The House Of Lords report stated: “Establishing a market for long term social care insurance would be difficult, even with a cap on lifetime social care costs or accommodation costs or an auto-enrolment scheme.
“Private insurance cannot provide the amount of funding required by the social care system, not least because roughly half of public social care funding is currently spent on people who are working age.”
It is estimated that more than two million requests for assistance with adult social care in England and Wales were lodged during the 2022-23 period.
Total expenditure by local government looks set to top £30bn in 2025 with a further £10bn required to keep up with growing demand during the next decade.
“There has never been a greater need for social care and the provision of quality care homes,” said Business Energy Claims’ CEO Callum Thompson. “Insurance of some kind could be the answer but many of the care homes that we work with now can’t afford to wait for commission findings or future reforms. They need help with their finances now.
“That’s why we’ll continue to campaign for those care homes that have been missold energy contracts at a time when they can’t afford to be losing any money.”