Long Term Care Working Group
Dr Louise Overton, Lecturer in Social Policy at Birmingham University and known to many in the industry, presented to the LTC WG on equity release and care – opportunities and challenges.
The presentation focused on the potential for equity release as a source of care funding, barriers to it achieving its potential and future research on social care in later life.
The core drivers for a potential market were policy strategies based on prevention – with a shift towards primary and community care services. The ability to modify the home environment (and pay for care at home) to meet changing needs will be central to this strategy. Accordingly, equity release has a key role to play here – enabling people to live independently for longer.
In addition, there is increasing recognition that the probability of needing domiciliary care is much higher than that of needing institutional care. As only a minority of Local Authorities now pay for people with low and moderate care needs, Equity release can play an important role in reducing growing levels of unmet need, preventing escalation to more substantial/critical needs.
However, there are systemic and attitudinal barriers to take up from attitudes to inheritance among the elderly to the role of local authorities when signposting self-funders for care to financial advice.
Dr Overton highlighted a range of significant research projects which will be undertaken this year – focusing on ‘finding and funding social care’ to improve understanding of self-funders experiences of finding and funding social care etc; ‘home investments’ – to understand the relationship between changing social care policy contexts and elderly home investment practices, and ‘planning to pay for care’ – to develop a freely available web-based decision tool that helps people to make informed decisions about planning and paying for care.
The LTC WG will monitor these closely. These will all add greater insight and understanding to policy-makers and the industry. They will largely be conducted by Birmingham University and the National Health Institute for Health Research – School for Social Care Research.
We will pay special attention to the interface between local authorities and appropriate financial advice for self-funders for care (who currently make up 43% of all people in the care system). We will of course prepare to respond to the long anticipated Social Care Green Paper – although other major political events are currently occupying most political attention!
Positive Thought Leadership Working Group
The ‘Positive Thought Leadership’ Working Group kicked off the year with a meeting in January to discuss and stress test the developing messaging grid. Time was also taken to look at next steps and expected outputs from the group which included challenges such as how we simply represent the advice process and what tools can be provided. Following this feedback, the messaging grid will be updated and circulated for final sign off ahead of being shared with a wider group. As the equity release industry and its narrative continues to grow and develop, futureproofing will be important and the next meeting – which is expected to be held shortly – will also look to the potential evolution of this working group to cover this.
Update: Horizon Scanning Working Group
The Board have requested that the Horizon Scanning work be subsumed into other activity. No further specific themes will be covered by the Working Group beyond the scope of the detailed review which was undertaken on the subject of Dual Charging, and which has been completed.
