Andrew Fisher, writing in the Guardian:

But rather than truly fixing the causes of the social care crisis, the Conservatives seem more concerned with protecting the property rights of the wealthy and the inheritances of their children. Raising NI contributions to fund social care will mean that working-age people on median incomes will effectively pay to protect the inalienable right to inherit a home. Moreover, the effects of the social care reforms are highly unequal: how much you lose will depend on where you live.

In many parts of England, where house prices are considerably lower than in the capital, people stand to lose a much higher proportion of their wealth under the new system. For example, a person paying for care whose assets are worth £186,000 would be left with £100,000 under the new cap. If they owned £1m in assets (because they owned property in London, for example), they would be left with £914,000 under the new system. Johnson may be hoping no one notices this untidy fit with his promises to level up.

Mrs Steve and I own our home, a 4-bed detached house with a big garden in a nice part of Cornwall. It's not a "property" to us (the incessant use of that word is a big factor preventing me from watching those daft programmes about escaping to the sun/country, etc.). It's our home. So we haven't a clue what it's worth as we've been here for 34 years and take little interest in "the market." We have modest but decent incomes, no debts and some savings. So what happens if, heaven forfend, we both go into long-term care?

Well our savings would soon get used up, even taking our pension incomes into account. We would then have to sell the house, assuming that there would be no prospect of either of us moving back in. That would provide for several years of care costs, I'd assume. If one or both of us lived long enough, that would leave £23000 each in the bank and we would still have our pension income. That doesn't seem too bad to me. There's not much point in having a house we could never live in and we wouldn't want sentiment over it to oblige the state to pay for our care.

That's as things stand now. But under this new regime our lifetime care costs would be capped at £86000 each. We would manage to meet most or all of that with our savings and pensions. Then it's free forever, and the house would be sacrosanct. Our two children's inheritances are protected. I might have to remind them of that should they moan about the extra NI contributions they'll be paying.

However, if my kids were, instead, the offspring of parents with no house and savings to pass on, there would be no inheritance. Their bad luck, eh? Not their mismanagement, for sure... But they would still be paying the extra NI contributions, which would be enabling people much richer than them to keep their assets to pass down instead of using them to pay for their care. If you think that's right, then I'm absolutely not with you.

One factor I've not mentioned is one that Johnson parroted out yesterday (part of the Tory mantra), that it isn't fair that hard-working people who have worked all their lives and saved up and managed to own their homes should have to lose it, etc. etc. But he clearly thinks that people who may have been just as hard-working but who have lacked the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time (like me and Mrs Steve, what with several demutualisation handouts and three house price booms behind us) should pay extra to allow the wealthy to have the inalienable right to pass on their wealth to their kids (who didn't do all the hard work, etc., that earned that wealth).

Like I said, there's a big moral issue here, and the Tory bleating about it all I've heard in the last couple of days is no more than threadbare wallpaper with plenty of cracks showing.

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