As has been often rehearsed on these pages, all governments know and say that social care (basically, looking after our aging population when they can no longer look after themselves) is a big and growing problem which needs to be tackled. By someone. From Tony Blair’s Royal Commission some 25 years ago to Boris’s pledge to ‘fix social care’, the required action has been kicked into the long grass/down the road/avoided, and so the problem worsens and the solutions become more and more expensive. For the foreseeable future, our advice is to assume you’ll have to pay (because most of our clients are likely to be able to); and that doing anything to ‘avoid’ paying will leave you at the mercy of local authority funding, which, sadly, will not get you much. This has to change, and, like most things that need fixing, will cost us all if we want a vaguely civilised system; because, with any luck, we will all be old at some point, and have a 1/2.5 chance of needing its help.
“Rachel Reeves may be forced to raise taxes”
Why did she/they (in the old sense) think that tinkering around with IHT and CGT would be enough to sort out the NHS; and the potholes; and…and the list goes on. My guess is that they asked the Treasury for a list of anything not involving income tax that they could get away with lightly, although they should already have learned from the winter fuel stuff that all publicity is not good publicity.