𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Campaigners are demanding that Sir Keir Starmer sack the head of a government inquiry tasked with ending the social care crisis. The Commission on Social Care, chaired by Baroness Louise Casey, has barely made any progress more than a year after it was created.

Members of campaigning group Silver Voices have voted to call for the commission to be axed. Director Dennis Reed claimed the body was being used to delay long-awaited reforms that could prove politically difficult for the Government. Last year, 900,000 people last year had requests for social care turned down and older people are being forced into selling their homes to pay for the astronomical costs of residential care.

More people will be forced to raid their life savings after the Department of Health and Social Care announced this week that it was freezing the level of assets people are allowed to own before they stop receiving care for free.

The lower “capital limit”, at which people make a means-tested contribution to social care, will remain at £14,250. The higher limit, when people are forced to pay for all their care themselves, will be £23,250.

Freezing the sum, rather than increasing it in line with inflation, means it is cut in real terms and ensures growing numbers of older people will have to pay.

The thresholds include the value of the person’s home if they are in a care home permanently, and their property is not occupied by their partner, a relative over 60 or a child. In this case, they may be forced to sell their home to meet the costs of care.

The last Conservative government announced plans to increase the higher threshold to as much as £100,000, and to introduce a lifetime cap of £86,000 on the amount anyone could be required to spend on their own social care.

However, Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves scrapped these plans in July 2024, saying Tories had not explained how they would pay for the changes.

Instead, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced in January 2025 that Baroness Casey would lead a commission reporting directly to Sir Keir “to make clear recommendations for how to rebuild the adult social care system to meet the current and future needs of the population”.

Mr Reed said his requests to meet Baroness Casey, or to obtain details of its work, had been refused. The commission has a website, but this only records three minor engagements since last April. The most recent news is of a meeting in Newcastle in October 2025.

He said: “We’ve had enough of the procrastination on social care. Baroness Casey needs to have her contract terminated, the Civil Service team supporting her needs to be disbanded, and Wes Streeting needs to start caring about the other half of his health and social care portfolio.”

Baroness Casey has been tipped as a potential replacement for Sir Keir’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who has quit No 10.

But Mr Reed said: “Casey may be in the running for the top job supporting Keir Starmer, but millions of older people have been disillusioned by her seeming lack of regard for the plight faced by vulnerable people who can’t get the social care support they need.

“If Starmer wants someone who will do his bidding without question and delay awkward political questions until the next Parliament, she may be a perfect fit.”

A spokesperson for the Independent Commission on Adult Social Care said: “The Independent Commission into Adult Social Care remains on track to report in two phases, with the first due in 2026, in line with its terms of reference.

“Since its launch in April, Baroness Casey and her team have engaged with more than 400 people with lived experience of receiving or delivering care, held cross‑party talks, established an online evidence portal, and taken evidence from frontline workers, care providers, councils, the NHS and charities.

“Later this year, the commission will launch a national conversation to build public consensus on what adult social care should deliver for citizens.”

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Age UK said it continued to back the commission but charity director Caroline Abrahams added: “We will keep on pressing for ministers to speed up the leisurely timetable they originally set for the Casey Commission: older people have already waited far too long for an effective social care system.”

Lisa Morgan, head of the nursing care fee recovery team at High James Solicitors, said: “The decision to keep the upper capital limit frozen at £23,250 means more and more people are being forced to pay for their own care, even when they would not consider themselves wealthy.

If that figure had risen with inflation since 2010, it would now be around £38,595 in today’s money. Instead, it has stood still for more than fifteen years while the cost of living has risen sharply. As savings grow in nominal terms but the threshold does not, more people are pushed over the line and into self-funding.

In practical terms, someone with relatively modest savings – often built up over a lifetime or realised through selling a family home – can quickly find themselves expected to cover the full cost of care, which can run into thousands of pounds each month.

The Dilnot Commission recognised this problem and recommended increasing the upper threshold to £100,000. That reform was legislated for and was due to come into force in October 2023, later delayed to October 2025, before being abandoned by the Government in 2024.

Instead of strengthening protection for families facing potentially catastrophic care costs, the continued freeze has quietly tightened the system. The longer it remains unchanged, the more ordinary people are drawn into privately paying for care simply because the rules have not kept pace with economic reality.”