August 2026: Wills, trusts and long-term care costs

One of the most painful financial situations families face is when a parent needs long-term care and the family home ends up being sold to pay for it. It's a real and common worry — and it's worth understanding what estate planning can and can't do about it, honestly.

The care cost reality

Long-term residential care in the UK is expensive, often running into thousands of pounds a month, and over several years the total can be substantial. If someone has significant assets — particularly a home — the local authority's means test can mean those assets are used to fund care before any public support kicks in.

What a will doesn't do

A will is essential. But it's not an asset protection tool. A will decides who inherits after you've died — it has no power at all while you're alive. If you need care during your lifetime, your will doesn't come into it.

Where trusts genuinely help

Trusts have real, well-established uses in estate planning:

• Protecting a vulnerable beneficiary. If you're leaving money to someone who receives means-tested benefits, a Discretionary or Vulnerable Persons Trust lets trustees support them without the inheritance affecting their entitlement.
• Protecting a share of the family home for a couple. A Property Protection Trust lets each partner ring-fence their share of the home, so the survivor can carry on living there while the first partner's share is preserved for the people they intended.
• Inheritance tax planning. Structured properly, trusts can be part of a legitimate, well-established approach to managing an estate's IHT position.

The part that needs real caution: trusts and care fees

Using a trust specifically to keep assets out of a future care means test is a different matter, and it's much riskier than it's often made to sound. Local authorities can apply "deliberate deprivation of assets" rules, treating transferred assets as if you still owned them, if avoiding care costs was a significant purpose of the transfer. For property, there's no fixed time limit on this being challenged. A transfer made in response to a parent's or relative's own care experience — the exact situation that makes people want to act — is precisely the kind of case a local authority is likely to scrutinise.

This isn't to say nothing can be done. It means this is genuinely specialist territory, where the details of timing, health, and intent matter a great deal, and where the wrong structure can fail at the exact moment it's needed. This is exactly the kind of work I refer to a solicitor who specialises in it, rather than treat as routine.

What's actually straightforward

For most people, the sensible starting point is simpler than it sounds:

1. Write a will. Decide who inherits, who manages your estate, and guardianship for children.
2. Set up LPAs. So someone you trust can make decisions about your care and finances if you lose capacity.
3. Talk through whether a trust makes sense for your situation — for a vulnerable beneficiary, a blended family, or protecting your share of the home as a couple — rather than assuming a trust is a general-purpose shield against future costs.

These are standard, well-understood planning tools. Deliberately structuring assets to avoid a means test is not the same thing, and deserves a much more careful conversation.

The point: Long-term care costs are a real worry, and proper planning helps. But be wary of anything that promises a trust will simply make the problem disappear — the honest picture is more careful than that.