Public to be asked who should pay for social care as part of major review

The public will be asked who should receive social care and how it should be paid for as part of a review into the system.

Baroness Louise Casey, who is leading a commission into adult social care in England, described the system to the BBC’s Radio Four Today programme as “impossible” to navigate and called for a “reckoning” into how people are cared for.

Baroness Casey said “challenging” conversations need to be had to determine how social care should function in a country with an aging population.

The government had scrapped plans for a cap on the amount anyone would need to spend on their support at home or in care homes over a lifetime and commissioned a review of funding instead.

Conversations with the public will focus on older people “too often ignored or overlooked” as well as young people “who are already losing faith that they will get anything back from the state in return for paying in”, Casey is expected to tell the Local Government Association’s (LGA) annual conference on Tuesday.

She will say her team, starting this month, will begin “testing the views of hundreds of thousands of members of the public to get under the skin of where the public are” in terms of adult social care, including how it should be paid for and what their role should be in caring for family members.

The public will also be asked what role the NHS should play in social care moving forward, with Baroness Casey telling the Today programme it has “withdrawn more and more from communities and into hospitals” in recent years.

Suggestions that families alone should be expected to care for their aging and ill loved ones are “simply not sustainable”, she added.

When asked if she hopes to deliver a publicly funded “National Care Service” similar to one proposed by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s likely successor Andy Burnham, Baroness Casey said “everything is on the table”.

“I am of the view that we need a National Health and Care Service, the public don’t see the difference and I don’t,” she said.

“Over time what has happened is the National Health Service has pulled more and more and more in what they think is medical and only medical and we have left basically everybody else to worry about what they think care is.”

Previously, she has described the care system as fragile and divided, with drawn out discussions over who pays for what, making it anxiety-laden and confusing for those who need support.

Her independent commission started work last summer.

It has been examining the problems facing the care system in England and is due to produce a report this year with a plan for how to create a National Care Service.

Phase two, which will look at how social care is funded in the longer term, is not due to report until 2028.