1:49PM GMT 15 Jan 2013

Last week, Parliament spent a full afternoon debating the extremely important issue of dementia. Colleagues from across the House spoke with real passion and emotion, sometimes based on personal experience, about a dreadful condition which in just a few years time will affect over a million people, or one in three of those aged over 65.

Most people will already know someone who has dementia or who will suffer from dementia in the future, and so how politicians deal with our ageing population and all the related issues that it brings is a real life electoral issue. People judge a government on its morality, and what can be more important than how we treat our vulnerable elderly?

It breaks my heart to hear about those in their retirement living in poverty. The Government has done the right thing to introduce the triple lock into pension increases, maintain the commitment to the winter fuel allowance and continue with cold weather payments. But with adult social care budgets being cut and a care funding crisis looming, so much more needs to be done, and it is time we recalibrated our spending priorities to ensure that taxpayers money, stretched as it is, goes into providing the services we need at home, not financing projects abroad.

The Dilnot Commission’s report into funding adult care, including that of our elderly, highlighted a major problem that many families up and down the country face every day – that of the increasing need for pensioners to sell their home and use their entire savings pot, built up over a lifetime, in order to pay for their care. Dilnot recommended a cap on the amount an individual should spend on their care and settled on a figure of £35,000. This would require an equivalent government spend of £1.7bn per year, a figure the Treasury baulked at. Instead, the Government is rumoured to be thinking of a cap of £75,000 which would cost the Treasury around £700m. The final cap will be one for debate, but the proposed £75,000 will not make a difference to the vast majority of those who pay for their own care.

The Treasury faces an enormous challenge in trying to reduce the deficit and clear up the economic mess left by the last Labour government, but it is quite clear to me and to the many families supporting those in need of residential or personal care that our spending priorities are wrong.

Over the next few years, our international aid budget will increase by around £3bn. I am not one to shirk our obligations to help poor countries around the world provide better education or health care. To be able to provide mosquito nets or clean running water in countries ravaged by disease is something that we as a nation should be proud of.

However, our aid budgets often extend beyond this and fund projects in nations like India, a country rich enough to have its own space programme and nuclear arsenal. Imagine what the £1bn the UK has given to India in the last five years could have done to improve the care in residential homes. We spend more on road projects in Bangladesh than we do on dementia research in the UK. At present, there are more clinical trials into Hayfever than there are into Alzheimers.

I applaud the work that the current, and former, Secretary of State for International Development has done to reassess the countries that we provide direct funding to and it is quite right that Russia and China will no longer receive the UK taxpayer’s shilling. But further prioritisation of our money needs to be thought through. More than £1bn a year goes into the EU Aid budget and a further £2bn is earmarked for “climate aid” to help developing countries build renewable energy sources. This is more than enough for the Treasury to compensate Dilnot’s £35,000 cap on care costs.

People in the UK are incredibly generous. We have lifesaving services like the Air Ambulance and lifeboats funded almost entirely by donations. We have hospices, children’s charities and numerous other good causes raising money from individuals every day of the week. But funding for our elderly, and particularly for those with dementia, a condition that turns the world of the sufferer and their families upside down, should not be about charity. It should be about morality. It is time to recalibrate our moral obligations and our spending priorities, freeze the increase in international aid spending and reinvest in the adult care services that need it most – here in the UK.

Tracey Crouch is MP for Chatham & Aylesford

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