For 37 years my dad worked as a Painter\Labourer in Devonport Dockyard, often working weekends to pay the mortgage and put me through University.
Proud to have been one of the Dockyardies who worked long hours to get the fleet ready to sail for the Falklands.
Dad worked to buy the family home, build up a savings nest egg and secured a pension which would ensure he could live a comfortable, not extravagant, lifestyle in retirement. He rarely took a holiday and in his own words always “saved for a rainy day”.
Now Dad spends thousands of pounds a month. At the rate he is burning through his cash his savings will be virtually all used up in his lifetime.
Dad’s spending is so high he may even have to sell his house to keep up! Is this a tale of excess?
Has he taken up with a new partner, lashed out on extravagant holidays and new cars or started gambling recklessly? No, it’s because my Father lost the lottery of life when he entered Residential Care five and a half years ago due to having a version of Parkinson’s which also has dementia-like symptoms.
I write this not to get sympathy for my dad or me, but because he is not alone. It could be any of us in future and it is already some of us now, who find our entire life’s work is lost in the last few years of our life:
Because we develop a condition which not just causes our eventual death but takes our life from us beforehand. No-one reading this column can know if they will be one of those affected, unless you already are.
Back in 2010, the Dilnot Commission estimated 50 per cent of people aged 65 and over will spend up to £20,000 on care costs. Meanwhile the Department of Health and Social Care estimates one in seven people will face costs of more than £100,000.
The National Audit Office has cited an estimate from industry experts (Laing Buisson) that £8.3 billion is spent annually on privately purchased social care.
The eye-watering amounts spent on fees, sadly do not result in well-rewarded social care staff. All too often some seeing the solution to social care workforce issues as lobbying for visas which allow recruitment at\near the Minimum Wage, rather than questioning why the system is based on this.
Social care reform is essential, but our political system has been unable to deliver it. Reviews have come and gone. Too often short-term political opportunism has trumped the need to deliver a longer-term solution: Mock gravestones attacking Labour Plans. Fake Estate Agent Boards attacking Theresa May.
The benefits are vital in the long-term, but the need to take difficult decisions immediately makes it hard to deliver, often against a backdrop of some mistakenly thinking “it’s free” because the NHS is.
Even a modest move to implement an £86,000 care fees cap, still an eye watering amount, was dropped by the new Government within weeks of the General Election. Yet the pressure to find a solution remains: more people living to the ages when conditions like dementia may strike.
Back in the 1970s there were roughly 4 people of working age to every 1 pensioner, now it’s 3 to 1, with more people set to lose their life’s work every year if no change is made.
I hope the new Social Care review will find a solution, yet delaying its publication until 2028, within the final 12 months of this parliament and just before a General Election, suggests otherwise.
