ghoulish figure was hidden away on page 135 of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report on budget day last week. The 125,000 deaths from Covid so far will save the Treasury £1.5bn in state pensions by 2022; savings will continue to be made during all the years those people should have lived. That shocking death toll brings in more inheritance tax revenues, too. But those deaths are another blow to social care providers. A substantial proportion of the people who have died so far lived in care homes, and they have left empty beds and an even deeper financial hole. Occupancy dropped from over 90% to around 70%, according to Martin Green of Care England, and families are now more reluctant to put relatives into homes. This week, the National Audit Office has warned that 94% of councils will have to cut spending, and social care is the biggest slice of their stricken budgets. On Wednesday, Care England called on the chancellor not to axe relief funds on 1 April: the fund pays (inadequately) towards testing, infection control and extra staff in an industry with an estimated 100,000 shortfall. The Health Foundation says restoring care even to the meagre levels of 2010 would cost £12.5bn. In other words, a crisis is becoming a calamity. Yet the chancellor said nothing on social care in the budget. Does it matter how many protest? Simon Stevens, head of NHS England, was vehement in his evidence to the Commons health committee this week that an urgent solution to social care and its staff shortages is needed. How can the forthcoming NHS bill create integrated care systems between the two services when the NHS is free but social care is means-tested? Some say Boris Johnson never had that “clear plan we have prepared” he promised on the steps of Downing Street. Others say there was one, but political advisers blenched at this wicked issue, where every solution involves political pain: either pay more tax, make older people pay a lump sum or a lien on their home on retirement, pay compulsory insurance, make young working people pay for property-rich older people, or lose inheritances in care charges? All would be seismically shocking to voters, few of whom know how paying for care works until their family is suddenly hit by the cost of it. The chancellor disingenuously called for “cross-party” working, but Liz Kendall, the shadow care minister, says: “This has not been discussed or even raised with Labour’s frontbench team, despite our repeatedly asking the care minister about this issue.” It’s a smokescreen to blame Labour later. Why not submit his entire budget to “cross-party” agreement? That’s not how politics works. When he was health secretary, Andy Burnham put up the only good plan – drawn up in a cross-party committee – from any recent government: on retirement, everyone with the means would pay a lump sum, or place a lien on their home, and thereafter care would be free. But just before the 2010 election, David Cameron withdrew Tory support so he could blast it as a “death tax”. Cynical electioneering trumped consensus. Ever since Margaret Thatcher privatised it, social care has been a hotchpotch of companies running homes and services. Some make a fat profit, as Caroline Abrahams, head of Age UK, points out; a luxury Surrey home for private clients can cost £3,000 a week, while some big companies with highly leveraged debt and property financing put their profits in offshore tax havens. On the other hand, small operators such as Mike Padgham, who runs four St Cecilia homes in Scarborough, rely on private residents to cross-subsidise the paltry sum councils pay for those who are state-funded. At one point in the pandemic, the occupancy rate at Padgham’s homes dropped to 60%, and the chancellor’s withdrawal of Covid relief funding on 1 April is a disaster. Covid is not over. “Where is Matt Hancock’s ‘Care’ badge, when he claimed social care was equal to the NHS,” asks Padgham. “I think he only wore it once.” The government appears to have forgotten its promise to equalise the pay, training and esteem of care and NHS workforces. Don’t hold your breath for any plan, despite yet another “later this year” promise. Despite nightly TV pictures of heroic care workers, despite claps for carers, despite the deaths of many care staff, social care is a secret world. Here’s the hard political truth: social care features nowhere in the top 10 of Ipsos Mori’s regular Issues Index. The public are mostly clueless about its financing until they encounter the nasty shock of putting a relative in a home, and finding the cost falls on their inheritances. Andrew Dilnot, author of the official government report on the issue 10 years ago, says: “We know how to do this, we just need to get on and do it.” What will it take? Social care collapse is already here in worsening council finances. While nurses’ pay is political dynamite, hundreds of thousands of frail people are denied the care they would have had a decade ago, left home alone and hidden from view. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist