The IFoA Social Care Working Party held a roundtable in April 2027. It brought together policymakers, industry leaders and experts to revisit a now-familiar question: how do we fund adult social care sustainably? This blog summarises the key themes from the discussion.
The UK has spent decades analysing social care. Reports have been written, commissions convened, and reforms proposed, yet meaningful change remains elusive.
IFoA members are actuaries who are independent experts in long term financial and risk modelling. The primary aim of the IFoA Social Care Working Party is to act in the public interest and inform the public debate through insightful actuarial analysis and thought leadership.
The IFoA social care roundtable in April 2026 brought together policymakers, industry leaders and experts to revisit a now-familiar question: how do we fund adult social care sustainably?
The conclusion was uncomfortable but unavoidable:
The problem is not a lack of ideas. It is a lack of political and societal willingness to face the trade-offs. This has manifested in a number of areas which were explored during the roundtable.
The current system still functions, but only just.
Local authorities are devoting an increasing share of their budgets to social care, with spending effectively stabilising rather than improving outcomes.
Demand continues to rise, unmet need persists, and preventative services are squeezed out.
This creates a dangerous illusion where there are no visible crisis events to force reform, but the underlying sustainability of the social care system continues to deteriorate.
This results in a system that ‘just about works’ and is politically convenient, but strategically unsustainable.
One of these big underlying challenges is funding, and the key but politically challenging question of:
Who ultimately bears the cost of care: individuals or society?
Current policy attempts to avoid answering this directly. Instead, it relies on a complex and poorly understood mix of:
The result is neither transparent nor stable and participants in our discussion were clear that:
With funding for potential reforms being so controversial, discussions turned to what solutions would be practical and realistic. Recent modelling by the IFoA explored whether a combination of public awareness and incentives for long-term care insurance could materially improve outcomes.
The findings are telling:
Most importantly, the modelling highlights a critical risk:
Policy that ignores behaviour will fail, no matter how elegant the design.
The reality is that purely voluntary insurance markets have repeatedly failed to scale in social care. Betting on them as a central solution risks repeating past mistakes.
This doesn’t mean insurance has no role. As a supplement to a clear state-funded system – particularly for people with higher incomes and assets – it could help reduce pressure on public finances and improve outcomes for individuals. But this depends on policy certainty. Without a proper and understandable framework, insurers and consumers can’t plan effectively.
Throughout the discussion, one non-health related issue dominated discussion around potential reforms. Housing wealth sits at the centre of the debate but is another example of a policy area deemed too politically toxic to combat.
For many households, the family home is the primary store of wealth. Yet there remains deep resistance to using it to fund care due to:
At the same time, policy continues to rely implicitly on housing to fund care through means testing.
The UK is already using housing wealth to fund social care; it is simply doing so in an opaque and inequitable way. Products such as equity release already allow some households to mobilise this wealth, but uptake remains low and access uneven – further evidence that market solutions alone cannot substitute for clear policy.
Until this contradiction is addressed directly, reform will remain constrained.
Discussion turned to what the UK can learn from international examples. It was noted that countries that have achieved more sustainable social care systems share common features, including national risk pooling, mandatory or quasi mandatory contributions and clarity around entitlements. These countries also operate on a social insurance system, compared to with the UK’s means tested model.
Germany's social care insurance scheme, introduced in 1995, and Japan's long-term care insurance system, introduced in 2000, are frequently cited as examples of mandatory contributory models that have delivered greater stability, albeit within different fiscal and cultural contexts.
By contrast, systems relying on voluntary contributions or localised funding have struggled.
The implication is clear:
Sustainable social care systems require collective funding and clear rules, not optional participation and ambiguity.
Yet these features require political decisions that successive UK governments have been unwilling to take.
Stripped back, the policy choices are clear – the UK faces three broad options:
The risk of doing nothing is a greater risk to society than the risk of doing something. Doing nothing is an active decision to allow the system to erode.
A recurring theme from the roundtable was trust. Individuals are reluctant to plan for care, whether through savings or insurance, because they do not believe the policy framework is stable or credible over the long term.
Without this:
Credibility is not a communication issue; it must be built into the core of policy design.
One mechanism worth exploring is an independent oversight body – analogous to the OBR's role in fiscal policy – that could provide transparent long-term projections, hold government to account against stated commitments, and help insulate social care funding decisions from short-term electoral cycles.
If the UK is to move forward, policymakers must do three things:
Be explicit about what the state guarantees, and what individuals are expected to fund.
Whether tax-based, insurance-based, or hybrid, the system must be coherent and internally consistent. Move funding to be managed centrally rather than locally, to remove the hidden impacts on other local services. This could take the form of a ring-fenced national care fund, a hypothecated levy, or integration with existing social insurance mechanisms – the precise vehicle matters less than the principle of removing care funding from the discretionary local authority budget cycle. Consider removing the state pension triple lock to create additional funding capacity to increase funding for care.
Reform will require politically difficult trade-offs. Avoiding those trade-offs has not eliminated them, it has simply deferred them.
The UK does not lack evidence, analysis or ideas on social care funding.
What it lacks is alignment between political incentives, public expectations and economic reality.
The longer reform is delayed, the more the system will rely on informal rationing, underfunded provision, and opaque redistribution through local authorities.
Doing nothing is no longer a neutral position, it is a policy choice with increasingly visible consequences.
The attendees at the event were:
