Shortsighted policy on care for the elderly is false economy

But this is expensive, meaning that successive governments have shied away from dealing with the problem, fearful of being punished at the ballot box. Both Gordon Brown and Theresa May made tentative efforts to address this conundrum, and were punished severely at the ballot box for their efforts.

As a result, it has fallen to cash-strapped local authorities to pick up the tab, meaning that services have failed to keep up with demand, and it is sick and the elderly who have paid the price.

The false economy of that approach is now laid bare in new research, which suggests that vast amounts of money are being spent on hospital care for people who would be better looked after in their own homes.

The report said that for every £5 spent on people in the last year of their lives, £4 of that was spent on hospital care - and more pertinently, £2.80 went on emergency care. 

By contrast, just 11 per cent is spent on primary and community care, and a mere four per cent on hospice care. This makes little sense from any perspective: skimping on preventative care adds to costs further down the line in expensive hospital care, while most people would prefer to spend their last days at home or in a hospice than in a hospital bed. Underfunding of social care leaves people languishing in hospital, when it would be cheaper and more humane to look after them at home.

There is no little irony in the Government's response, which has been to launch an inquiry into cost of inaction on adult social care reform.

The time for inquiries is surely over. We now need to see some action.