Tax rises, less generous pensions and bigger bills for those with larger homes were all revealed in the budget as part of the chancellor’s bid to resurrect the nation’s flagging finances.

But there was one huge problem that didn’t even get a fleeting mention, even though it could soon wreck your finances, and that’s long-term care funding.

It’s not a vote-winner or a problem easily solved but it is something that urgently needs addressing.

We have an ageing population. We are living for longer, but we are also living in ill health for longer. One in two people are now likely to get a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime and one in three will develop dementia — illnesses that can slowly reduce someone’s quality of life for years or even decades, with care potentially needed for much of that time.

The Dilnot report, an independent review commissioned in 2010, concluded that the adult social care system in England was “confusing, unfair and unsustainable”, and that it required significant reform to “protect people from catastrophic costs”.

Since then, successive governments have promised to tackle the social care issue, with the most recent proposal — left over from Boris Johnson’s tenure — being to cap lifetime costs at £86,000. It would have applied only to personal care costs (such as help with washing and eating), meaning that you would still have had to foot the huge bills for accommodation and energy, but it was a start.

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It was meant to come into effect in October 2023. But it got delayed and then, shortly after Labour came into government, it was scrapped altogether. There is now another independent review into the problem of care funding, due to conclude in 2028. But even if it presents its findings on time, the government then needs to decide what it wants to do, consult on it and then get it through parliament. After that it’s likely that any changes will be phased in slowly by local councils. There’s zero chance that they will have been rolled out everywhere before the early 2030s.

We’ve now been left with a system where, in most cases, only those with assets worth less than £23,250 qualify for state-funded care, and this can include the value of their home if they move into a care home. Anyone with assets above this threshold faces an unlimited bill for care should they need it.

In the meantime, costs keep on rising. The average weekly fee for a self-funded resident staying in a care home is £1,278 — an 18 per cent rise on the £1,086 average cost in 2022, according to the healthcare analyst LaingBuisson.

An average 60-year-old man who lives until he is 89 could pay £667,000 if he lived in a care home for the last three years of his life, according to the wealth manager Charles Stanley. For those who would need to live in a nursing home — where more help is available — costs will be much higher.

And anyone who is self-funding will pay more for the same care in the same home than those whose care is funded by the local authority. The average weekly fee paid by councils for residential care is just £908. It’s a shocking two-tier pricing scandal.

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Whether you or a loved one will need care — and how long for — is a lottery. But with care prices rising steadily over the past decade, even a couple of years in a care home could drain your savings.

No one seems to care about long-term care, but we all should.

We rage about how the taxman will take a slice of the money we wish to leave behind for our families, but the reality is that most of your wealth could end up being spent on care in old age. Because without a cap on bills, the open-ended cost of care means there might not be much left to pass on — if any at all.