Elderly care faces £6bn shortfall

Every working family could face paying an "ageing tax" to provide care for the elderly, Gordon Brown proposed yesterday.

The ageing tax is a central plank of a six month consultation launched by the Prime Minister in the face of a growing crisis over who should meet the bills for the care of the elderly.

The Daily Mail reports that this new tax would take the form of a compulsory levy to force people to cover the cost of care home places in the last stages of their lives.

The introduction of such a tax would reignite questions, most recently provoked over charges for rubbish collections, about what exactly people pay Council Tax for - if all the services that it's supposed to cover have to be paid for over again.

According to the BBC report, Gordon Brown says that the care system in England alone faces a £6bn shortfall within 20 years. An amount that just happens to be exactly the same as our new net annual contribution to the EU's leaky budget, which Gordon Brown agreed to following a deal done by Tony Blair in December 2005.

The PM claims that the Treasury cannot pay the fast-rising cost of care homes and home help as the number of elderly people increases, and that the system now needs a 'radical shake up' to avoid this cash crunch.

But another possible solution could be that, rather than force everyone to pay yet another tax, we stop wasting billions of pounds a year on the EU, the "majority" of whose spending has been a mystery to its auditors for 13 years in a row.

Why won't Gordon Brown consider stopping this blatant waste of exactly the amount of money he needs, in order to prevent elderly care services deteriorating or hitting people with yet more taxes?

The new consultation paper was launched by Mr Brown in a talk at the King's Fund, the research group that published the 2006 report on the cost of ageing by Sir Derek Wanless.

Sir Derek estimated that an extra £10billion is needed to make the care system work properly, but there was only a token £31million of new money on offer yesterday - just under two days worth of what the Government is prepared to hand the EU. A terrible example of the government's warped priorities with scarce public funds.

Yesterday's consultation paper, endorsed by Mr Brown and seven Cabinet ministers, put back any decisions until next year.