News that the Government could delay until July its response to recommendations on social care funding, made last year by the Dilnot Commission, have been received sympathetically by local government experts.

Whitehall sources have told the BBC that senior Treasury officials are ‘agonising' over whether Oxford economist Andrew Dilnot's recommendation to cap individual lifetime bills at £35,000 – at a £1.7bn cost to the exchequer in its first year – are affordable and sustainable.