Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of allocating funding to local authorities to enable uplifts in the discretionary element of the minimum income guarantee for social care users and to enable waivers on care charge debts.

On 28 February 2022, a local authority circular was issued to set out a 3% increase to the Minimum Income Guarantee from April 2022. Funding has been allocated to local authorities to make this uplift.

We have no plans to increase the Minimum Income Guarantee above this level in 2022/23 or change existing localised debt recovery processes. However, local authorities maintain the discretion to waive debts and uplift the Minimum Income Guarantee, in line with the ‘Care and support statutory guidance’. As part of the Local Government Finance Settlement, local authorities can use of over £1 billion of additional resource for social care in 2022/23.