Liz Truss promises 'nobody will be forced to sell their home to pay for social care'

Liz Truss has promised that nobody will be forced to sell their home in order to pay for social care.

The new prime minister confirmed she would be reversing the national insurance hike, despite pledging to fix social care provision in the UK this coming winter, in a move that is expected to cost billions.

She said her “first priority” on social care is properly funding it over the winter because there are “too many” people staying in hospital due to a lack of spaces.

National Insurance had originally risen for millions of workers around the UK back in April.

Boris Johnson broke his manifesto promise in September when he pressed ahead with the plan to increase national insurance in the form of the 1.25 percentage point hike, in order to fix what he called a "broken social care system," and to help ease the burden on the NHS as it recovers from a pandemic.

In the run-up to winning the UK premiership and being named the leader of the Tory party, Ms Truss announced plans to scrap with the rise.

However, the plans that have been mooted by the new PM raise questions over how improvements to social care provisions will be paid for.

When asked if she would stick to plans to "fix social care" and keep the cap on national insurance, Ms Truss said: "My first priority on social care is making sure we're getting the money into social care this winter, because we currently have too many people who are having to stay in hospital due to issues in the social care system."

Pressed if she was sticking to the 2019 Tory manifesto pledge that nobody would have to sell their homes to pay for care, Ms Truss responded: “I am.”

In September, the government under her predecessor Mr Johnson announced that an £86,000 cap on care costs would be put in place from October 2023.

The Tory manifesto in 2019 said social care reforms must “guarantee that no-one needing care has to sell their home to pay for it”.

The charity Age UK said the system makes it “very difficult” for leaders to guarantee there is no possibility of someone needing to sell their home.

Charity director Caroline Abrahams said: “The only sure-fire way of achieving this is to make care free at the point of use, like the NHS.

“At Age UK we would be thrilled if our new Prime Minister is proposing to do this, but she has not given any indication to date that this is what she wants to do.”

Ms Abrahams said that, under the existing cap, the majority of people will need to sell their homes to fund their care.

She continued: “Aside from the fact people need to fund their own care up to the cap, even after they have reached it the cap does not cover all the bills that arise if you need a lot of care for a long time: for example, the cost of board and lodging in a care home is exempt and there are other bits of small print which make the cap less generous than it initially seems.

“The reality is most of older people don’t have access to anything like the kind of cash you have to spend to reach the cap – about eighty thousand pounds – without selling their home.”

She also said the cap was not nearly enough on its own, with a crisis in the social care workforce, largely around pay, and councils needing more money to reduce growing waiting lists for care and assessments.

It was thought that the increase to national insurance would raise £39 billion over the next three years to help reduce the Covid-induced NHS backlog and later reform adult social care for the long-term.

Some financial experts have said the reverse in the national insurance hike will cost the government £13 billion annually.