Professor Richard Berthoud
The Department of Health’s recent proposals for the future of care may threaten the everyday living standards of millions of elderly and disabled people living at home. That’s according to Richard Berthoud from ISER.
In a recently published green paper, the Government says it will ‘consider integrating some elements of disability benefits, for example Attendance Allowance, to create a new offer for individuals with care needs’.
Findings from ISER suggest that these disability benefits are mainly used to pay for the extra costs of living associated with disability, not to pay for caring services. Richard Berthoud thinks the proposal to ‘integrate’ disability benefits into the social care system may increase the amount of social care available to some severely disabled people but that it will reduce the income available to meet the weekly costs faced by many more elderly and disabled people living at home.
Attendance Allowance, and the care component of the Disability Living Allowance (for claimants over or under the age of 65, respectively) pay up to £70 a week to nearly four million disabled people, at a cost of £9bn per year. Since the need for “care” (or attendance) is the main criterion governing eligibility for the benefits, it is sometimes assumed that the money is intended to pay for care. On the other hand, the past governments that introduced these benefits made it clear they were intended to contribute to the general extra cost of living faced over the long haul by disabled people and their families – extra heating, special diets, the incidental costs of hospital visits and so on – not necessarily on caring services. Standard of living indicators suggest that the current benefits do little more than compensate disabled people and their families for the extra costs associated with disability. A reduction in their cash incomes is likely to lead to an increase in deprivation.
Professor Berthoud, who conducted the research in collaboration with Professor Ruth Hancock at the University of East Anglia, said:
“No-one disagrees with the need for a better system of paying for social care, and we welcome some of the proposals put forward for consideration in the Department of Health’s Green Paper. But who should pay for the increased public funding of much-needed care for very old or severely disabled people? Should it be taxpayers in the middle and upper ends of the income distribution? Or should it be other disabled people?”
Disability Benefits and Paying for Care is the full working paper produced by Richard Berthoud and Ruth Hancock.
Read an earlier article from the The Guardian on this issue authored by Richard Berthoud and Ruth Hancock