Should a primary school teacher on a salary of £20,000 pay to help a lord or a former prime minister settle comfortably into old age? I wonder whether the staff whom Gordon Brown met when he visited the assisted housing scheme in Plymouth to launch his big review of long-term care financing would welcome being told it is only fair that they contribute to Tony and Cherie Blair's retirement nursing in future. Perhaps Lady Thatcher's, too. (It is one of the oddities of this debate being led by the Prime Minister that it doesn't apply to him - being Scottish, he will receive long-term care free anyway.)

The Government is proposing that younger workers should fund the care of the elderly through a new form of social insurance or ageing tax; a “new social care and support system”, offering protection to all, as the Prime Minister put it. Mr Brown added an astonishing thing: “We can and must look to give people the opportunity and the support to save for their old age in a way that insures them and protects their houses and their inheritance.”

It is amazing that after all the row over the 10p tax grab, and party fury over inheritance tax freebies to the better-off, Mr Brown is banging that drum again. Here is the man who supposedly believes in meritocracy, who presides over a campaign deriding the Conservative candidate in Crewe & Nantwich as a “Tory toff” because he will one day inherit part of the family business fortune, yet who is himself seemingly worrying away over how to protect people's inheritance. If it was an attempt to curry favour with the Daily Mail, it failed dismally: that newspaper splashed “a tax to pay for old age” all over its front page, with a column inside for good measure: “Who'd be old in Labour's Britain?”

Well you can't have it both ways: either we all pay, and it's a tax, or the people who need the care pay, and it might eat into their inheritance. Which would be perfectly fair - people reaching retirement age now have done well from the State and the housing market over the years: free university education, generous final-salary pension schemes, rocketing property prices. Today's pensioners will receive more from the welfare state over their lifetime than they paid into it, a balance that is beginning to switch with the baby-boomer generation and will dive into negative equity for the generations following.

Care is just the tip of it. With a quarter of the adult population expected to be over 65 by 2028, a doubling of people over the age of 85 and a quadrupling in those living to 100, the cost of care is predicted to double to £24 billion and then increase to £41 billion (in today's prices) by 2041. Yet by 2050 there will be just two people of working age for every pensioner.

Nobody denies that a definitive solution from government is long overdue. The best idea I have heard would not require a new tax, would protect people's homes while they are alive, but might have a small impact on thier inheritance. It comes from James Lloyd at the think-tank the International Longevity Centre and it sounds so perfect there must be a flaw somewhere, but I cannot see it. The idea is this: at retirement, each person with assets (the State would cover those without) would be asked to make a voluntary payment - today it would be £15,000 - to buy an insurance policy against care in old age. Or they can pay instalments each month, or - and here is the real beauty of it - agree to have the £15,000 taken from their estate after death.

Anyone who chose not to join the scheme would have to meet their own future care costs of up to £24,000 a year. Those who did join, would be covered, for life, for whatever care they needed. Simple, yes? And brilliant.

All these ideas, all these figures, are out there and easily accessible. Instead of looking at them, working out where it stands and making a decision, the Government has launched another long consultation, with a website where everybody can whinge - sorry, have their say: www.careandsupport.direct.gov.uk.

At least they are asking the question, I suppose, but does anybody believe they will take a firm decision? In the 11 years since Labour swept to office promising a “fair system for funding long-term care for the elderly”, some 4.5 million people in England and Wales have died after retirement age. That's 4.5 million people, most of whom will have had to grapple with what everybody agrees is a cruel lottery of a care system, needs unmet, homes lost, health failing, unwashed, untended, unfed - 11 years after Labour promised to end it.

End it? It's only talked about it. Again, and again, and again. First there was the Royal Commission, which proposed free care for all. I remember some vague idea knocking around No 10 for a voucher scheme enabling elderly people to choose between public and private providers of services. That got strangled by the Treasury at birth. It was to form part of a five-year plan for long-term care, which, for all I know, we are in the middle of.

Then, two years ago, Sir Derek Wanless, he of the NHS funding inquiry and a former NatWest chief executive, published a non-governmental report proposing that the State fund a minimum level of care but we pay top-ups, matched by the Government, to get a higher standard. The Government ignored it.

So now they launch a six-month consultation, to be followed by a Green Paper, to come up with a proposal for a manifesto... I know Mr Brown is posing as the man for the long-term decision, but this is ridiculous. Any more long-term and we shall all be dead.

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