Raid NHS budget and welfare benefits of well-off older people to boost social care funds, Nuffield Trust suggests

The government should reallocate some NHS funding to pay for the social care of elderly people in England, a report from the Nuffield Trust recommends.1 It also suggests removing welfare benefits from well-off older people and increasing taxes on them to make more funds available.

The report considers where the extra money could come from to fund the additional social care recommended by the Dilnot commission last year.2

The commission led by the economist Andrew Dilnot looked at how to provide more support for the many people—often on very low incomes—who no longer receive publicly funded social care because of stricter eligibility criteria and at how to reduce the unfairness of a system in which some people have to sell their homes to pay for care. It proposed a lifetime cap on individual contributions and argued that a degree of certainty on what social care would be funded was needed. This would enable people to …