A T THE TIME it did not seem like a particularly bold pronouncement. Two years ago Philip Hammond promised £2bn ($2.4bn) extra for social care in his spring budget. While doing so, the chancellor struck a characteristically dour tone, warning that the sector required more than just the occasional injection of dosh; it needed a strategic, long-term plan. A few months later came an unexpected general-election campaign, in which the Conservatives’ social-care proposal won the moniker of the “dementia tax”, since it would have forced many with the disease to sell their home to fund their care. The policy was widely blamed for the party’s terrible performance. The long-term plan—still promised—has yet to arrive.

Unsurprisingly, a strategic approach to social care has not emerged in its absence. Despite additional cash injections, public funding of social care is 3% lower in real terms than it was in 2010. In the same period, the number of people over 65 has grown by 19% and the number of working-age people requiring care is also on the rise. Public funding is provided by local authorities and is available only to those with assets of less than £23,250 (the calculation excludes their house if the person remains at home). Cuts have also bumped up costs for those paying for their own care, whom providers increasingly use to subsidise residents funded by the state.

Cross-subsidy is not a long-term solution to the difficulties providers face, however. On April 30th one of the biggest, Four Seasons Health Care, followed in the footsteps of many smaller ones by announcing that it had gone into administration. The problem is that in poor parts of the country, where lots of people receive publicly funded care, providers have little choice but to put up with harsh budget cuts. In 2016 the Competition and Markets Authority, a regulator, surveyed social-care provision and found that although the industry as a whole was just about able to cover its costs, the same was not true of care providers that mainly served state-funded residents.

The funding system discourages investment in other ways, too. Because it is hard to predict how long care will be needed, people tend to underspend to ensure they have enough money to last their dotage. Others hope that they will require no care at all, or do not understand how the system works and think they will not have to pay for it, and therefore fail to save enough. The result is both worse care and a lack of innovation. Productivity in the sector has fallen by 12% over the past two decades.

In the absence of proposals from the government, others are floating ideas. Last summer the House of Commons committees for health and local government issued a joint report calling for a new tax on those aged over 40 to fund social care. On April 29th Damian Green, a former Tory cabinet minister, published his own proposal in a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-leaning think-tank. Modelled on the pension system, it would offer everyone free basic care, partly funded by higher taxes on older taxpayers. People would be prodded to pay for insurance products that offered a better standard of care, using savings, their house or other assets. Funding would be handled by Whitehall rather than local councils, which are struggling with miserly budgets.

Social-care experts quibbled with Mr Green’s sums and his confidence in the emergence of an insurance market for old-age care. But the more damaging attacks came from Labour. John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, claimed Mr Green had “let the cat out of the bag about Tory intentions to punish older people with a tax on getting old”. Meanwhile Matt Hancock, the health secretary, ruled out any option that would include the family home when totting up somebody’s assets. Their interventions highlight the fact that politicians have more to gain from shooting down proposals than coming up with their own. A solution to social-care funding appears a long way off.