Hackney ends its £250 a week limit on home care charges

Hackney Council has removed the £250 a week ceiling on what residents pay towards care in their own homes, with the change in force from 7 September.

The idea was first put forward 16 months earlier, under the previous Labour administration. Councillors called the old limit “generous” and said ending it was fairer to residents, bringing Hackney into line with the minimum support the government sets and with what other councils offer.

Who pays more for home care in Hackney

The national threshold comes from the Care Act 2014: anyone holding more than £23,250 in savings or other capital is generally expected to fund their own care. Hackney went further than that for years. Its charge for non-residential adult social care stopped at £250 a week, so many residents above the threshold still had part of their costs met.

One disabled resident who funds their own care expects the monthly bill to roughly triple, from £1,000 to about £3,000.

A public consultation ran from July to October 2025. Most respondents were critical, and 66% of them used adult social care. Many said they had low incomes or relied on welfare and could not afford higher charges. Most of those with income or savings above £23,250 argued it was unfair to ask more for care that was already costly, particularly for disabled people.

How much the council expects to raise

Ending the cap is expected to bring the council about £150,000 a year, and the wider changes to its charging policy around £416,000 a year. Demand for social care in the borough has grown by 40% since 2020, and the council forecasts net spending of £123 million on adult social care in 2026/27, roughly 16% of its total budget.

When the change was proposed in May 2025, the council said it would only affect the wealthier 40% of residents, while the other 60% below the statutory limit would “continue to pay nothing”. Of the 1,089 care users whose financial records the council holds, 373 were classed as paying nothing, roughly 34%. Around 1,900 other users are missing from that count because the council has no financial details for them. Some of those records disappeared in a cyber attack on the council in 2020. In other cases the resident never returned a financial assessment.

The cabinet approved the wider package in December 2025 without a finalised Equalities Impact Assessment. Officers resubmitted a draft in which the part explaining how equalities findings shaped the decision was left blank. The council says the completed review exists and can be seen on request.