One of the biggest challenges our society faces is to how we will deliver and pay for adult social care over the next generation. As many older and disabled people in Thanet will testify, care standards today are patchy and can de difficult to access yet, despite the fact that most people pay all or part of the cost themselves, the state already contributes about £14bn a year in England towards care for those people who are entitled to some help.

And that is a bill that is going to rise steeply. By 2050 there will be four times as many people over 85, the age group that is most in need of care services, than today and the number of people living with dementia or other disability is rising even more steeply. If social care costs £14bn today, I think we can expect it to cost around £50bn at today’s prices by the middle of the century and that is without any significant improvement in the level of care provided!

When I was a health minister we produced ‘Independence, Wellbeing and Choice’, a Green Paper that set out the ‘vision’ for what social care should look like in the future. It set out a template for care services that would help people to maintain their independence and enjoy life to the full. It was well received by all parties. The question that remains outstanding, however, is how we will pay for these services as demand for them inexorably increases?

Thankfully, there might be signs of sense entering the political debate on this subject. ‘Free personal care’ was championed by the Liberal Democrats in recent years despite the fact it was unsustainable in the long term. Now they have withdrawn that policy and their spokeswoman has even apologised for the way they misled people into thinking it might be affordable.

In Scotland they do have free personal care, but they paid for it by raiding funds intended for other purposes including a substantial sum intended for the care of disabled children. Many people mistakenly think that free personal care in Scotland includes free residential care but it does not and, although in England people can arrange with social services to pay care costs after their death from the sale of property, in Scotland this is not an option because the money that allows this was also diverted.

Likewise, the Tory promise in their 2005 manifesto that if people paid the cost of their own care for three years the state would pick up the bill after that has been dropped. Almost no-one frail enough to access the system would have been alive after three years!

So, with the Tories and the Liberal Democrats both ‘rethinking’ where they stand perhaps there is a chance to reach a cross-party agreement on the future of social care funding. That is why the Government has launched a period of consultation, to be followed by a Green Paper.

How much more funding should the state provide? How much should individuals pay? What should be the eligibility criteria for state help? Should we help people to release equity from their property to pay for care and a better standard of living in old age? Should we introduce a social insurance scheme that we all pay into at 65 if we have assets? How should we support carers? These are all key questions, but none of them are simple to answer and no answer will be universally popular. Nevertheless, answers must be found, and found soon.