Beyond caring: a new funding model for later-life social care

Read the full report  

Read an executive summary of the paper online here.

It is no secret that England’s adult social care system is in crisis. Chronic underfunding, regional disparities, and distributive unfairness plague the system. Unmet need is soaring, with over 2 million later-life and 1.5 million working-age adults not accessing the social care they need. All the while, individuals, families, local authorities and care providers face increasingly unmanageable financial pressures. 

At every point in the system and for many involved, the funding model is failing. This crisis is only accelerating in the face of an ageing population and the growing cost of delivering care. The funding model is in desperate need of foundational transformation, not the tweaking of past decades.  

England currently has a single funding model for working-age (adults pre-retirement) and later-life (retirement age or older) social care, under the umbrella of ‘adult social care’. Yet for working-age and later-life care, there are fundamental differences in: the nature of care needs arising, the problems plaguing the current system, and best practice. Recognising this, Beyond caring makes the case for disentangling the funding models for working-age and later-life social care.  

Beyond caring then proposes a radical new funding model for later-life social care, based on four key principles: risk pooling, sustainability, fairness, and deliverability.  

In this new model, working-age adults would make mandatory contributions to a Later Life Care Fund from the age of 34. This Fund would be privately managed with an explicit mandate to maximise returns, then used to pay for each contributing cohort’s own care needs in later life. Beyond caring sets out proof-of-concept modelling to show the sustainability of such a system, as well as mechanisms to ensure that it remains responsive to the changing needs of care users and the growing costs of care.  

Recognising that individuals will have contributed towards their potential later-life care needs through their working life, the vast majority of later-life care costs that arise will then be funded out of their cohort’s Later Life Care Fund.  The value of ‘protected’ assets which will never be used to fund someone’s care will be more than doubled.  

Failure to act would be unconscionable. Beyond caring offers a radically different model to bring later life care back from the brink.

Related work:

Read our launch day long read on our Substack