Pensions and Long Term Care Steering Group

The UK has an ageing population and this presents both opportunities and challenges for individuals and Government. One of the challenges is meeting long term care costs, which is a significant funding challenge for individuals, and both, current and future governments.

The Pensions and Long Term Care has oversight of three research groups:

• Products Research Group (now includes the Long Term Care Working party members)
• Products Impact Group (closed 2016)
• Pensions Income Modelling Group (Closed 2016)

The over-arching objective of these groups is to explore the role of pensions as a framework for saving to meet potential long term care needs.

The Products Research Group, published a paper in 2014 ‘How pensions can help meet consumer needs under the new social care regime’ and an interactive regional mapping tool illustrating costs for those entering care and the likelihood of benefitting from the cap on care costs as outlined in the 2014 Care Act. The group is working a second report that will be published late 2015.  They then published a joint paper with Independant Age in November 2017, and presented at the Life Conference 2017. 

The Products Impact Group, which closed in 2016, produced a series of case studies to understand how financial products for long term care might impact on a person’s wealth should they have long term care needs.

The Pensions Income Modelling Group, which close din 2016, explored the possibility of a project to develop a continuously maintained repository of pensions data to improve pensions and long term care policy and planning in the public and private sector.

Outputs:

• Lessons from down under: comparisons in funding long-term care in the UK and Australia | The Actuary. - Thomas Kenny