Someone is going to have to pay for the social care that older people need and English councils cannot afford to buy. Last week’s warning from social services directors that cuts could lead, within a few months, to people being denied help with tasks such as washing and dressing themselves, while policymakers drift in a “sea of inertia”, is only the latest cry for help from a sector whose neglect is shameful. Eight years ago this week the economist Andrew Dilnot delivered a set of proposals that was supposed to be the basis of a cross-party solution. The failure to fix a lacuna in the welfare state lies with all parties, but falls most heavily on the Tories, who have been in power and promised two years ago to publish a green paper on social care.

The basic unfairness is that health is publicly funded while social care is mostly not. For elderly people and their families, care feels as important as therapy. That’s why it feels wrong that people with assets over £23,000 must pay to be looked after if they have, say, dementia, while cancer patients are treated for free. When social care is residential, the value of a person’s home is mostly included in calculations, with one in 10 people estimated to face catastrophic costs of more than £100,000. While politicians have dithered over new funding arrangements and local councils have made huge cuts, the service offered to people in many areas has deteriorated. Around 400 care homes have closed over the past five years, with low pay cited as the main reason for difficulties recruiting staff. Meanwhile, thresholds for home care have become so high that many needy older people do not qualify even for 15-minute home visits. Increased hardship and loneliness among old and disabled people and their carers are the consequence.

There are well-founded fears that the rising costs of social care could overwhelm all other council services. The share of council funds being spent on social care rose from 34% in 2009-10 to 41% in 2017-18, with predictions that adult social care could consume 60% of local tax revenues within 15 years. Councils are not only on the wrong side of long-term, demographic pressures, but are also being squeezed by government cuts. The knock-on effects on other council services (libraries, parks, youth services) are all too well known. Then there’s the “care gap”, which requires extra social care to be made available for patients who are well enough to be discharged from hospital, but who must remain exactly where they are until somewhere can be found where they can be cared for. Earlier this year, a report by former minister Damian Green estimated the cost of such hospital “bed blocking” at £1bn a year.

There is also a more general harm inflicted by political failure. It has been widely recognised by policymakers for at least a decade that the risks created by the growing needs of an ageing population should be pooled. It would not be fair to extract taxes from younger people to pay for social care – better to make the elderly asset-rich contribute. This is not an easy sell, but it has been made harder by both main parties disgracefully playing politics over this issue in the 2010 election, and in the 2017 one. Now, the disruption of the Tory leadership race combined with uncertainty over Brexit means a solution is even further away. Politicians have been unable to work across the party divide, while the reality of growing intergenerational inequality has been deemed too bitter a pill for the public to swallow. We hardly need more proof of how divided our nation is. But the continuing social care crisis provides it all the same.