Future Demand for Long-Term Care, 2001 to 2031: Projections of Demand for Long-Term Care for Older People in England

The financing of long-term care raises a great many questions. How many older people are likely to require long-term care services in the coming decades? How much are these services likely to cost? Will the cost to public funds prove affordable? Who should pay? How should costs be divided between public expenditure and private sources of finance? In order to address these issues, reliable projections are needed of future demand for long-term care and future long-term care expenditure. This paper presents projections of demand for long-term care for older people in England to 2031 and associated future expenditure. The projections were produced using an updated and expanded version of the Personal Social Services Research Unit’s (PSSRU) long-term care projections model. The version of the model used here has a base year of 2001 and incorporates the recent 2001-based interim population projections. The first part of the paper describes the PSSRU long-term care finance research programme and recent associated projects. The second part describes the PSSRU long-term care projections model, including details of the data used in this updated version. The third part presents a set of base case assumptions and the projections obtained using those assumptions. The fourth part investigates the sensitivity of the projections to changes in those assumptions. Section five discusses the findings and planned future developments of the model. A final section sets out some conclusions