In this new White Paper for the ILC-UK Centre for Later Life Funding we argue that “Recent successes in poverty reduction at older ages could be reduced to a footnote in history” in the absence of a long term strategy for later life funding.

The White Paper, “At a cross-roads: understanding the future likelihood of low incomes in old age”, was launched at a morning event hosted by the Chartered Insurance Institute and sets out the priorities for Government over the next Parliament.

In the White Paper, we argue that a strategy for later life funding must:

• Secure effective funding for adult social care
• Implement the Dilnot reforms
• Find ways of ensuring the provision of mass market financial advice
• Develop default options for those who “sit on their pension pots and do nothing”.
• Be clear around what constitutes the deliberate deprivation of assets within the context of the new pension freedoms
• Incentivising downsizing
• Support innovation in the equity release market
• Support policy which extends working lives

The White Paper sets the agenda for the ILC-UK Centre for Later Life Funding, which will explore these issues and trends over the coming year.

About the Centre for Later Life funding:

This report is the first publication from The Centre for Later Life Funding, which in turn, sits under the guise of the ILC-UK. The Centre is, in part, a continuation of its predecessor body the Care Funding Advice Network (CFAN) – a coalition of organisations and individuals seeking to improve on the Care Act’s recognition of the need for financial advice.

The Centre represents a significant expansion in terms of scope and output to include policy briefings and research papers which consider not just questions about care funding but questions about funding retirement more broadly. And it will be focused on developing ideas and solutions to these questions. We think that the artificial separation of retirement funding from care funding is unhelpful given that long-term care can be one of the biggest costs that people face during their retirement years, and the new “cap” will not change that fact. We are grateful to all ILC-UK Partners who have made this possible.