Something has to be done about spreading the burden of funding social care for the elderly. It’s not simply a question about getting more money into the system, though that certainly needs to be done. It also about fairness, for at the moment, some people have their life savings wiped out by having to pay the fees of a care home or nursing home in their old age.
But how? Andy Burnham has said he is prepared “to expend quite a lot of political capital” to do something about this, and there have been suggestions that there should be changes to inheritance tax (IHT) to raise the funds.
One idea he spoke about is that there should be a National Care Service funded by a levy of 10 per cent on “everyone’s assets, savings and homes”, though this was before he became a candidate for the top job. But this runs into a huge political problem: opponents call it the “death tax”.
Benjamin Franklin, who helped draft the US Constitution, famously observed that: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” A “death tax” would run the two together. IHT is already the most unpopular tax of all, largely because it is seen as double taxation: people pay taxes all their lives and then they have to pay yet more after their death.
