Independent Age commissioned Grant Thornton UK LLP to create a model that would identify how much money would be generated by a number of different policy options available to the government to fill the ever-widening social care funding gap in England. At the same time, we asked the Social Market Foundation to look at the financial impact these policy options would have on individuals of different ages, with different income and wealth.
Nine different policy options have been proposed at various times during the prolonged discussion of the future funding of social care. They were analysed by both organisations:
- Increasing Income Tax by 1%
- Increasing National Insurance for both employees and employers by 0.5%
- Charging National Insurance to the working population over the age of 65
- Introducing an age-related levy of 0.7% to the working population aged 40 and over
- Introducing a one-off payment at age 65
- Increasing Inheritance Tax by 2%
- Increasing Council Tax by 3%
- Increasing Corporation Tax by 1%
- Increasing business rates by 3%
The result is a comprehensive analysis of the relative merits of these different funding policy options, key aspects of which are contained in our report A taxing question: how pay for free personal care
