Author: Barry Cooper

“RACHEL MORTIMER | ASSISTANT MONEY EDITOR

Why don’t the seriously ill get the free care they’re entitled to.

It is back to business as usual this weekend after the festive season. But while many of us will have spent the past couple of weeks having a joyous time with their loved ones, this may have sown the seeds of new worries.When families come together at the end of the year it can become acutely apparent how older members or those struggling with ill health have deteriorated — and how other relatives are finding it hard to cope as carers. Some unpaid carers do not feel comfortable asking for help, but many others do not know what support is available to them. The understanding of care in this country is murky, and few know what they are entitled to. Too many assume that they will get no support from the state if they fall ill and require care, or mistakenly believe that they will need to forfeit their home to qualify. • Dad died before he got his NHS care fundingSeriously ill adults with complex health needs should be entitled to free care, at home or in a care or nursing home. This is called NHS continuing healthcare in England, Wales and Northern Ireland — it was available in Scotland until 2015 but has since evolved into hospital-based complex clinical care, which can be offered only in a hospital setting. ADVERTISEMENTCrucially, NHS continuing healthcare is not means-tested and a person’s assets are not taken into consideration when it is decided whether they qualify for funding. You could have £5 or £500,000 in the bank, your entitlement to free care is the same. The funding can be life changing. The average weekly cost of a nursing home was £1,241 in November, according to the Office for National Statistics. A year in a typical nursing home is likely to cost more than £64,000, a sum that would make short work of the most diligently saved nest eggs. Eligibility depends on having a “primary health need” because of illness — those who require social care because of old age and frailty will not qualify. • The £61,000-a-year care cost crisisNHS continuing healthcare is hard to secure, however. Almost 49,000 people in England were assessed for it in its standard form in 2022-23 but only 22 per cent were deemed eligible, according to NHS England statistics. In England, applications are assessed by local integrated care boards rather than by a central NHS body, and each interprets eligibility differently, creating a postcode lottery. What qualifies as a primary health need in Surrey may not get you funding next door in Hampshire. Those who have cognitive conditions such as dementia are at particular risk of falling through the cracks and the complexity of their needs can be missed during funding assessments. Perhaps it is because of this ambiguity and the strikingly low success rate of applicants that NHS continuing healthcare is so little known among those who need it most. I spoke with one reader this year who hadn’t heard of the funding despite her father having been in and out of hospital for six months before having dementia diagnosed last year. He had worked until he was 79 and paid taxes for decades, only to be kept in the dark about crucial support in his hour of need. Something has gone very wrong when patients who could be entitled to life-changing care funding are not given the opportunity to apply for it. And if they do apply and are rejected too many assume that the NHS must be right, when this is often not the case. The NHS has been forced to pay back millions of pounds after patients — or someone acting on their behalf, such as a relative, charity or lawyer — have appealed against an unsuccessful care application. You have six months to lodge an appeal, and you can secure retrospective funding dating back years. • ‘How we got £90,000 back in care home fees’I spoke with one man who won back £250,000 in wrongly paid care fees for his mother. But his fight for NHS continuing healthcare took the best part of a decade, and the refund came six years after his mother’s death. This is a sad reality. There are too many cases where relatives have spent the final years of their loved one’s life appealing against incorrect funding decisions — taking up precious time and energy that could be spent with family — only for the NHS to finally admit it got the decision wrong after the patient has died.ADVERTISEMENTSo many people who should get help with their care will be incredibly vulnerable and without a relative or friend to fight their corner. They face raiding their savings and selling their home to pay for care that they should be getting free.Applying for NHS continuing healthcare and appealing against rejections are gruelling and time-consuming. You need to navigate a labyrinth of red tape. But regardless of whether you decide to apply, it is your right to know that this funding is available. If you know someone who is severely ill and might need care now or in the future, put NHS continuing healthcare on their radar. It could transform their quality of life.”

I am glad to see that The Times has caught up with my earlier comments on this little publicised issue.

The NHS does not advise patients about the availability of continuing health care payments because it costs them money. Nursing homes do not publicise their availability because self-funding patients subsidise those who have been means tested and are paid for at a lower rate by their local authority therefore the fewer receiving continuing health care payments the higher is the income of the nursing home.

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Nothing to do with the Christmas Turkey.

Just reading that Jaguar can no longer manufacture the vehicles with added security for our political masters.

They now will be obtained by the Metropolitan police from Germany, more specifically Audi.

Why?

Because of the regulations introduced by the Brexit deal!

From today’s media:

Former Bank of England policy maker Michael Saunders said Britain’s exit from the European Union is one of the reasons why the UK is now entering a period of austerity. 

“The UK economy as a whole has been permanently damaged by Brexit,” Saunders said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Monday. “If we hadn’t had Brexit, we probably wouldn’t be talking about an austerity budget this week. The need for tax rises, spending cuts wouldn’t be there.”

He said that the UK’s decision to leave the EU and the customs union reduced the country’s potential economic output and eroded business investment. His comments echoed the sentiment last week by the head of the British Chambers of Commerce, Shevaun Haviland, who said that British firms haven’t seen any upsides from Brexit so far. 

The remarks add to growing criticism of the central accomplishment of the Conservative government, which after a referendum in 2016 decided to implement a strict break from the EU. It also feeds into debate about how Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s should handle the economy, which the BOE says is already in recession.

Saunders, who sat on the Monetary Policy Committee until August and is now senior economist at Oxford Economics, said that Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt should focus on improving trade links with the EU. He also pointed toward improving education and training as ways to boost productivity, as well as fixing the rise in long-term sickness, which has driven large swaths of people out of the workforce since the pandemic. 

Saunders also said that the chancellor’s fiscal statement on Thursday should include measures that avoid damaging the economy further. So far, Hunt has suggested he’ll cut spending and raise taxes to plug the Treasury’s widening deficit — delivering a squeeze on the economy at a time the economy is shrinking.

The former BOE official suggested policies included introducing a tiered system of interest rates on banks reserves, reducing tax relief for top rate taxpayers on pension contributions, closing some of the tax loopholes open to non-domiciled residents, and reducing the tax-free allowance on dividend income.

“These kinds of measures would probably have a less adverse immediate effect on the economy than raising the headline tax rates or cutting the main departmental public spending,” said Saunders.

According to Mark Carney reported in the Independent

Brexit

Interest rate pain is consequence of Brexit, says former Bank of England governor
Current financial woes ‘bear out warnings of Remain side in EU referendum’
The pain of soaring interest rates and inflation is a knock-on effect of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has said.
Mr Carney said that Thursday’s decision by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee to hike its base rate to a 33-year high of 3 per cent was in part forced on it by Brexit.
The rise – which will add hundreds of pounds to monthly mortgage bills – came as the Bank forecast as much as eight successive quarters of recession in the UK, stretching into 2024 in what could be the longest sustained downturn for a century.
Mr Carney told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that much of the country’s current financial crisis is down to the Covid pandemic and war in Ukraine.
But he said the downturn has also borne out warnings made at the time of the 2016 EU referendum about the impact of Brexit
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“What’s happened in the UK and other economies is we’ve had the impact of higher energy prices which has slowed down the rate of pace that the economy can grow, we’ve had the impact of Covid, which has changed the labour market and our capacity to grow,” said Mr Carney.
“And then, of course, in the UK – unfortunately – we’ve also had the near-term impact of Brexit, which has slowed the pace at which the economy can grow.
“The economy is operating at a level above its capacity and that’s adding to the inflationary pressures that we’re getting from the war in Ukraine and elsewhere. And the bank needs to slow the economy, which is why it’s raising interest rates.”
Mr Carney said that it was clear that the UK economy was weaker as a result of Brexit.
“Sterling moved against all major currencies from the point at which the referendum was called and then it moved more sharply after the referendum result,” he said. “It hasn’t recovered. It’s fluctuated around but it has not recovered.”
Brexit had delivered “a long-standing shock to productivity in the economy”, he said.
“It was predicted that we would get that. It’s coming to pass.
“This is what we said was going to happen… The economy’s capacity would go down for a period of time because of Brexit, that would add to inflationary pressure and we would have a situation – which is the situation we have today – where the Bank of England has to raise interest rates despite the fact that the economy is going into recession.”
Brexit has caused a “structural shift”, reducing the size of the UK economy in relation to similar countries in purchasing parity terms, said Mr Carney.
“That structural shift is in part what the government and all of all of us are dealing with in the UK, which is that we’ve had a big hit to our productivity, the capacity in the economy, the speed limit of the economy, as well as the level of the economy.
“And we have to take some tough decisions in order to get it back up. And that’s one of the consequences of a decision taken a few years ago.”

I could not put my beliefs any better than this article in the I.

This is when the myth finally dies. The last few weeks have seen the complete and utter destruction of fantasy-land politics. We’re witnessing the end of the age of Brexit.

You can almost feel it in the air around you. A consensus is forming, not just against the current administration, but the Vote Leave era in its entirety. Polling released by the Tony Blair Institute today found 59 per cent of the public thought Brexit had worsened the UK’s economy, including over a third of Leavers. Even the Telegraph comment pages – the last holdout of Leaver radicalism – show evidence of a recalibration. One recent headline read: “Project Fear was right all along.”

On the face of it, this makes no sense. The Budget wasn’t about Brexit. Politically, it was a decisive turning away from the working-class, state-intervention Toryism which defined the premierships of Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

We’re now witnessing the terrible, inevitable end of the Brexit adventure

It is an old story about people promising a utopia on the horizon. It’s ending the same way it always ends: in misery, poverty and decline

October 19, 2022 3:03 pm (Updated October 19, 2022 3:40 pm)

This is when the myth finally dies. The last few weeks have seen the complete and utter destruction of fantasy-land politics. We’re witnessing the end of the age of Brexit.

You can almost feel it in the air around you. A consensus is forming, not just against the current administration, but the Vote Leave era in its entirety. Polling released by the Tony Blair Institute today found 59 per cent of the public thought Brexit had worsened the UK’s economy, including over a third of Leavers. Even the Telegraph comment pages – the last holdout of Leaver radicalism – show evidence of a recalibration. One recent headline read: “Project Fear was right all along.”

On the face of it, this makes no sense. The Budget wasn’t about Brexit. Politically, it was a decisive turning away from the working-class, state-intervention Toryism which defined the premierships of Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

Instead, Liz Truss retreated back to a semi-literate playground version of Thatcherism. All the talk of “levelling up” and “left-behind” areas was gone. She rejected the electoral alliance which won it for Leave in 2016 and played so well for Johnson in 2019.

But when you dig a little deeper, the connections emerge.

Truss was right about one thing. Growth has been sluggish. Tax rises are going to be acutely painful. The question is why. Why was this all happening in the first place? And a big part of the answer lies with Brexit.

Since we left the EU, there has been a sudden and persistent 25 per cent fall in UK imports from the EU relative to the rest of the world. According to the Bank of England, Brexit lowered the level of investment by almost 25 per cent in 2020-21. The Office of Budget Responsibility estimates that Brexit is set to reduce productivity by four per cent – double the impact of Covid.

John Springford, an analyst at the Centre for European Reform, has spent his time since Brexit comparing the performance of the British economy to a set of doppelgangers – a basket of countries whose economic performance closely matched the UK until the 2016 referendum. They provide a realistic assessment of what would be happening in an alternate present, where we never voted to leave.

The results are brutal. In the final quarter of 2021, UK GDP, a measure of the size of the country’s economy, is 5.2 per cent lower than it would have been if we had voted Remain. Investment is 13.7 per cent lower and goods trade 13.6 per cent lower.

As economic researchers Adam Posen and Lucas Rengifo-Keller put it: “Brexit means that the UK has declared a trade war on itself.” It is the reason we have a smaller economy, which therefore needs higher taxes to pay for public services, which then led Truss to her hara-kiri mini-Budget. What we are witnessing is the direct causal result of the suffocating economic impacts of Brexit.

Read More

PMQs performance reduced Liz Truss to a piece of political tumbleweed19 October, 2022

And what back-up plan do we have in the face of that? What newfound power did Brexit hand us to deal with our grim new circumstances? None whatsoever. Quite the opposite. Brexit was sold as the return of sovereignty – a brave new age in which the country could do what it likes without meddling from outside. But now that pure sense of sovereignty is revealed for the delusion that it is.

Far from being autonomous, our government is a hostage of the markets. Jeremy Hunt’s recent statement reversing the previous mini-Budget might as well have been written for him by investors. Ministers are not making their own policy decisions. They’re doing whatever will win back the stability they need to function.

The reason for that is simple: no country enjoys pure sovereignty, not even China or the US. They are all constrained by forces, events and institutions outside of their borders. They can either engage in that process or they can deny it, but the reality will remain regardless.

This central fact of political existence is now being realised, after six pointless years of pretending otherwise. And something else is coming back too. We’re witnessing the return of objective reality to political debate. We are being given a hard, painful, heavy dose of it.

Truss’s policies led to soaring interest rates on 30-year bonds. That resulted in increases to people’s mortgage payments.A clear-cut line of causation emerged, from the words spoken at the Commons dispatch box to the lives of those unlucky enough to be governed by them.

And as objective reality returns, economic orthodoxy does too. There’s no more nonsense chat about how obstacles make no difference to trade or customs borders can be replaced by imaginary high tech solutions. There’s no more Alice in Wonderland frivolity in which we pretend that basic elements of economic life do not apply.

Now we see that they do. If you put up trade obstacles, trade falls. If you restrict the size of your market, investment falls. If you increase spending, cut taxes, freeze out independent assessments and provide no plan for how you’re ultimately going to make it all match up, markets will lose faith in you.

We’re witnessing the terrible, predictable end of the Brexit adventure: from soaring nationalist rhetoric to plummeting national performance.

It is an old story, about the people who come along with fine words and easy answers, promising a utopia on the horizon just so long as you don’t worry yourself too much about the details. And it is ending the same way it always ends: in misery, poverty and decline. 

I don’t think I know any or more precisely any who admit it. Yet 80000 or so of them voted for Liz Truss and her fantasy economic policy. She got into power and did exactly what she had been promising all summer and surprise, surprise financial collapse. Where are those 80000 who voted for her and did not have the economic knowledge to foresee the consequences? Deafening silence!

The fairy tale was that her policy would produce growth. Did anyone other than those 80000 really believe that. The only way Britain can produce the target of annual growth of 2.5% is to rejoin the single market and this would also solve the Irish issue. This is not just my view but the view of most respected financial institutions.

Anyway perhaps some of the 80000 would like to explain their logic and their plan for the future now that the economic plan they presumably agreed with has been torn up.

Can somebody who voted Brexit please remind me of the real advantages as opposed to the promises.

Immigration: higher and plans from new government to increase numbers to help with the labour shortage caused by Brexit and covering every job from fruit pickers to doctors and particularly impacting hospitality.

Trade deals. Lots to replace the ones we had as a member of the EU and as far as I can see all slightly inferior. A damaging deal with Australia and the promise of an early trade deal with the US now put back for several years.

Economy: well where to start. Now on a par with Greece and on most criteria the worst in the G7. Just add on inflation, interest rates, cost of living, tanked sterling, growth rate or rather recession rate and pension reduction in real terms.

NHS: Any sign of the increased funding on the side of the bus? The increased national insurance contribution designed to fund the NHS and Social Care scrapped and anyway that was coming from the taxpayer not from some bonus from leaving the EU.

Northern Ireland: a real mess which threatens the Good Friday agreement and no one seems to have any idea what was Boris’s master plan to solve it. Oven ready has proved to be deep frozen.

Power of our courts: still seem to be subject to EU decisions in so many areas.

Sovereignty: do we have control of our borders? If so why do we need to divert people to Rwanda of all places with its appalling human rights record.

And then I read that the government is considering joining a political union being promoted by President Macron and including EU states and additional countries as well and I wonder what it has all been about.

Do we blame Brexit or the implementation of Brexit? And yes I do take into account Covid and Ukraine. Both very serious issues but it seems to me that our ability to deal with both would have been much better as part of a united EU.

Thank goodness!

This government makes me ashamed to be British.

Why?

1. Behaviour towards Europe since Brexit as a result of which many sectors of our economy cannot get the workers they need.

2. Prevarication over admitting Ukranian refugees.

3. Plan to send potential immigrants to Rwanda with a view to them settling there. Dividing families and subjecting them to a regime with an appalling human rights record.

4. First Prime Minister to break the law while in office.

5. Prime Minister and other members of government ignoring Covid rules they had introduced.

6. Failing to help those most in need from the hardship due to spiralling inflation and huge increases in fuel costs. The nation of eat or heat.

7. Party time on the eve of the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral.

8. Social Care not really helped at all. Just future promises that are difficult to believe.

9. NHS waiting lists. Yes I know about Covid but they were dreadful before the pandemic.

10. A Prime Minister who has a long history of being untrustworthy.