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Social Services - the financial assessment

Once we have assessed you as being eligible for a home care service, we will carry out a financial assessment to decide how much you will pay (except for people who are exempt).

The financial assessment is a way of working out how much money you have available to pay towards the cost of your care.

In order to make a financial assessment we will ask you to fill in a form for details of your income (for example, benefits, state pension, works pension) your capital (for example, bank and building society accounts, shares, national savings certificates) and your expenses. You will have 15 working days to provide this information once it has been requested.

We keep all this information confidential.

Your income

We look at the money you get from pensions, from most types of benefits, or from other sources such as payments from other people. We only count the income after tax. We are not interested in money which you earn as wages.

Your savings

Because you can earn interest or dividends on savings, we include them in our financial assessment. We look at the money you have in the bank or savings accounts, in stocks and shares or other investments. We do not count the value of the home you live in.

If your savings are more than £24,000 you will automatically be charged the full rate for home care.

However, there may be instances where savings over £24,000 are not classed as capital assets. Certain sorts of assets could be treated as income and not as capital. This could affect the amount you would need to pay towards your care.

Therefore, even if your savings are over £24,000 you may wish to give us details of your assets so that we can assess them appropriately. We can then tell you whether this makes a difference to your financial position.

Your expenses

We take account of some of your essential expenses, such as rent or mortgage payments and council tax payments.

We will give you more details of what we do and do not count as savings, income and expenses.


Working out what you will pay

Once we have collected all the financial information, we:

  • work out your total weekly assessed income, including any income from savings;
  • subtract your expenses.

We don't expect you to spend all the money that's left on home care. There is a minimum income that the law says you are entitled to use for other things. This amount will vary according to your personal circumstances. 

If your assessed income, after expenses, is less than the minimum income then you will not be expected to pay anything towards the cost of home care. If it is more, you will be expected to pay towards the cost of home care.

We work out the total cost of your home care at a rate of £23.16 per hour, and £5.79 per quarter hour where relevant.

Where less than one hour's care is provided in any week, the charge will be the equivalent of one hour's care or, the assessed maximum charge, whichever is the lower.

We compare the total weekly cost of your care with your assessed income, over the weekly allowance. You pay whichever is less. Nobody will be asked to pay more than £100 per week.

We will provide you with a statement setting out the calculation of the payment that you must make.

Note: All the figures apply from 12 April 2021. They will be reviewed every year, and may be changed. 

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