Dithering over Dilnot - Telegraph One thing that people seek as they get older is certainty. Yet on the matter of financial security in old age - not least in terms of paying for the cost of care - the Government offers confusion instead. Two years ago, the Dilnot report recommended a cap on how much the elderly would have to pay for their care: a lifetime's individual contribution would not exceed £35,000 and the state would pick up the rest. The Government endorsed the principle, but raised the cap significantly - although it later promised to ensure that pensioners with diminishing funds could defer care costs until their death. Now the Labour peer Lord Lipsey has revealed that, according to the fine print of the proposals, thousands of people will not qualify for the deferred scheme until they have run down their savings and assets to below £23,250. He claims not only that the Government has emasculated Dilnot's plan, but that it has done it "in a back-door manner" that hid the truth from the public. This week, more than 200 peers demanded that the Government change the voluntary payment-deferral scheme to make it universal, but they were defeated in a vote in the Lords. Whatever the nature of the final scheme that comes into effect, people need clarity. We all want to know how the state is able to help us as we grow older, if only to calculate what we need to do privately to guarantee our care. Any amount of dithering or secrecy leads to greater uncertainty about what the future holds. Britain has an ever-expanding population of older people. Whatever system we come up with - ideally one that places a greater reliance on private insurance - there has to be a debate about what is fair and what is affordable, and it has to be conducted both with realism and out in the open.