Dementia tax still hangs over us after Theresa May’s U-turn | Letters

Polly Toynbee castigates Theresa May for her U-turn on social care funding (After May’s U-turn she can’t accuse anyone of weakness, 23 May). Polly believes Theresa was right to make rich people pay more for social care. Should rich people pay more for social care? No. Rich people should pay more in taxes.

The fundamental principle of the welfare state is not about reducing inequality but sharing risk. Over recent decades risks have grown increasingly in many aspects of our lives, from pensions to pay, employment to public services. Alongside economic forces driving these changes, social policy has increased the risk by undermining the fundamental principle that the welfare state helps us share risk. This feeling that one’s life is out of control has been seized on by the populist right in a series of electoral triumphs from Brexit to Trump. So Polly and May are wrong to make funding social care a personal not a shared responsibility. Jeremy Corbyn is right to argue for a social care service.

Labour offers a vision of a civilised society where risks are shared. The Tories will throw people to the wolves when times are tough. In the remaining fortnight Labour needs to drive home the message of the need to share the costs of social care. And incidentally that our proposals for funding social care help protect the NHS and will cost less in the long run.
Cllr Steve Munby
Lab, Riverside ward, Liverpool city council

• Polly Toynbee was courageous and correct last week to give Theresa May credit for the important strategic judgment that the social care bill for our large and collectively wealthy older generation should be paid by us and not by our less privileged juniors through general taxation (Opinion, 19 May).

Sadly, along with the rest of the commentariat, she and the Guardian (May’s manifesto meltdown: U-turn on ‘dementia tax’ leaves PM on back foot, 23 May) have been too distracted by the spectacle of a U-turn to home in on the other key point: Mrs May’s spotlight on the iniquitous contrast between the help this country guarantees for the cancer victim compared with other devastating illnesses like dementia. This was a major factor in the public outrage about the “dementia tax”. In 2010 there was similar outrage as the Daily Mail, with its “death tax” headline, colluded with David Cameron to bury Andy Burnham’s plan for a social insurance levy on the wealth of the elderly to pay for free social care.

For nearly two decades I have been proposing just such a levy (15% of personal wealth at 65, collected after death). Metropolitan wisdom recognised the justice but dismissed it as a political non-starter. Events of the last week indicate otherwise, and the challenge now will be to get the other parties to stop taunting and use this opportunity to agree a consensus around parity of illness and an equitable framework for the older generation to collectively shoulder the cost of its care. With a bit of encouragement from Polly, Mrs May could, of course, match some of her expressed concern for the “just managing” by deciding to do just that herself.
Colin Godber
Winchester

• Dear Mrs May, In my letter to you last week (Letters, 20 May) I expressed my regret that you had excluded the idea of a cap on dementia care costs. I, meeting my wife’s £38,000-a-year care costs from our combined pension incomes of £47,000, and having spent over £110,000 on this over the past three years, hoped you would understand my concern.

I am so pleased to learn that you have changed your mind on capping costs – or have you? A consultation after the election on finding “the right funding model for social care” with an “absolute limit on what people pay” is all a bit vague. This could mean a repeat of the 2015 manifesto promise “to cap costs by April 2016”, binned after the election. Could you also be a bit clearer on who will pick up the care costs after I have reached my cap? Dropping it on local authorities, after their 45% cut in funding last year, will just mean inadequate payments for care, leading to more bankruptcy and care home closures, putting me back where I am now. Can we have some evidence, before the election, of what a strong and stable care package looks like?
Brian Collingridge
Wiveliscombe, Somerset

• Theresa May was right when she said her tinkering to her proposed dementia tax has changed nothing. Most people from hard-working families who are unfortunate enough to need care in old age will still have their house sold when they die to cover costs. What other reason can there be for Mrs May not telling us what level the cap will be set at until after the election? This is an anti-aspirational tax. Why invest our hard-earned money into “owning” a house when only luck will determine whether we do genuinely “own” it. Even after the mortgage is paid off it will still be little more than a lifetime rental property if you later require care. In an age of offspring living at the parental home well into adulthood, a trend that is likely to continue to increase, it brings further insecurity to the younger generation, who by inheriting the parental home at least knew they had a guaranteed roof over their heads, or could use their inheritance to help buy a property. It will disproportionately affect poorer people, whose house is by far their greatest financial asset and legacy. It is the opposite of John Major’s Conservative vision of “wealth cascading down the generations”. That Theresa May’s Conservative party continues to attempt to pass off this regressive tax as benefiting “hard-working” families and addressing “intergenerational fairness” beggars belief. To single out the cost of care for mental degenerative illness as the financial responsibility of the sufferer is a shameless attack on the postwar founding principles of our welfare state that bind us together as one nation.
Dr Guy Spence
Bude, Cornwall