Selling the family home to pay for care is not an injustice

The sound of the well-off grumbling about their finances is always an unattractive one. But there is one gripe that has become particularly powerful, filling the airwaves and shaping public policy. This is the persistent, ever louder complaint from many households that they are required to sell the family home to pay the costs of care for a close relative. It is a practice widely seen as ‘a scandal’, where the state seizes private property because of its own failure to create a properly funded care system that meets the needs of the elderly.

The flames of grievance are stoked by the press, pressure groups and politicians, who promote the belief that all social care should be free, or at least massively subsidised. The campaign body Age UK moans that ‘167,000 older people now have to fund their own care because they do not meet the brutal means test’. One newspaper recently screeched about ‘the betrayal of the middle class’.