State Benefits and Long Term care
Your local authority has a duty to carry out care assessments for anyone who appears to them to need community care services.
These services include home help, respite care, meals-on-wheels, or a place in a residential or nursing home.
Most local authorities will have different ‘levels’ of assessment, depending on what they think your needs may be. For example, if you only have a ‘simple’ need (for instance a grab rail by the bath), you may have a ‘simple’ or’ low-level’ assessment.
If you have a more complicated need, your assessment may be on a higher, more intense level. Because there are no national standards on how care assessments should be carried out, there can be wide variations between different local authorities.
Your local authority can ask you to pay for some social services, which it arranges for you. There are no national rules about how much you might be asked to pay and local authorities that do charge, have very different systems.
After the assessment you will be assessed as either
- Not requiring any services
- Needing services while still living in your own home
- Needing permanent residential or nursing home care. In this case you will have to go through a ‘means-test’.
The Means Test
This is the system of calculating how much you should contribute towards the cost of your care in a residential or nursing home. The Government lays down regulations, which have to be adhered to. The standard rate – i.e. the amount it costs the local authority to provide the place may vary between authorities and may even vary between individuals in the same area.
The local authority will include any capital, savings and income that are in your name and/or you share
The local authority may also include ‘notional capital’ in the means test. This is capital which you may no longer have, for example, capital which would be available to you on application, or capital which you have deliberately disposed of to avoid using it to pay for care and to qualify for benefit
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Your Property
Both the local authority and benefits agency (part of the Department of Social Security) must ignore the value of your former home when it continues to be lived in by one or more of the following:
- Your spouse or partner
- A relative aged 60 or over
- A relative aged under 60 who is incapacitated
- A child under the age of 16 whom you are liable to maintain (applies to the Local authority)
The local authority has the discretion to ignore the former home if someone is still living there who does not fit the above criteria, for example a younger relative has been helping look after you.
If you own your own home and no one else lives there, for the first three months that you are receiving residential or nursing care the value of the property will not be included in the means test.
If you own your own property, but do not have sufficient money to pay the fee to a residential or nursing home, the local authority will assess you as paying the full fee and so you may build up a debt.
Although it can’t force you to sell your property, it has the authority to create a ‘legal charge’ on the value of your property. This is a formal process, which means that it puts a claim on the value of the property so that it can claim back the money, which you owe once the property has been sold.
The local authority can do this without your consent. It might do this if it placed you in a home, and you either refused to sell your property or raise the debt accruing to them whilst you are alive. However, it can’t add interest to the charge until the day after you have died, if the charge hasn’t been recovered in the meantime. The amount owed to the local authority will build up and will have to be recovered eventually. | 
