Adults with a disability or mental illness are receiving extra care bills running into thousands of pounds that they say could force them to cut back on food and heating and threaten their social independence.

Amid a care funding crisis, some English councils are quietly increasing charges to people with learning disabilities and mental illness, in effect clawing back welfare payments and leaving some working-age adults with little more than £3 a day to spend.

People facing the charges fear they will be unable to afford enough clothes and worry that basic pleasures like swimming trips will have to stop. One single man living with bipolar disorder said he may have to put down his dog because he will be unable to afford to look after it.

Care charities have drawn up dossiers of charges they describe as a new “care tax” and say it is a result of national underfunding of social care. The Health Foundation has estimated that at least an additional £6bn a year is needed to meet growing demand, rising to £14bn if the country wants to improve access to care and pay more to staff, many of whom earn minimum wage.

Mencap, the learning disability charity, said it had received dozens of “concerning” calls to its helpline about the issue, and its chief executive, Edel Harris, said it was “causing huge distress for them and their families, ​and leaving many without enough money to cover their additional needs”.

Some people are refusing to pay and are considering legal challenges. Care Act guidance says charges must be “reasonably practicable” for people to pay and that the approach to charging should promote “independence, choice and control”.

Hundreds of millions of pounds of care home fees paid by residents and local authorities are never reaching frontline services, claims a report.

The Centre for Health and Public Interest has revealed £1.5bn a year “leaks out” through rental payments, interest on loans, and profits.

The figure is 10% of the total annual income of the UK care home industry.

The think tank says some of this money could be used for frontline care if the industry were restructured.

The centre’s study – which is part funded by Unison – analysed the accounts of 830 adult care home companies across the UK.

The average cost for a residential care home place in the UK is £32,084 per year, not including nursing care.

The study found that among the 26 largest care home providers, £261m of the money they receive to provide care goes towards repaying debt.

Of this, £117m goes to related companies.

“Hundreds of millions of pounds a year leak out of the care home industry in the form of rental payments to offshore landlords, in the form of profit, in the form of management fees and in the form of rental payments again to offshore companies,” CHPI director David Rowlands told Newsnight.

“Lots of debt has been loaded onto large care home companies by the companies that brought them and that means in some cases that 16% of all the money that is given over to care for a resident each week disappears out of the system to pay off those high cost loans.”

The funding crisis in special needs education is deepening, with council overspends on support for children with conditions including autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder rising by 30% in just a year, the Observer can reveal.

Figures sourced under the Freedom of Information Act from 118 of the 151 local authorities in England show that councils are expecting to overspend their high needs block budgets by £288m in 2019-20 – up from £232m in 2018-19. When money raided from mainstream schools budgets is included, however, these figures rise to £315m in 2018-19 and nearly £410m this year – a rise of almost 30% in the space of 12 months.

The high needs block is government funding that supports children with higher cost needs. Children with moderate special needs are funded via mainstream schools budgets.

Councils in rural areas like Dorset have five times less than to spend on care of the elderly than those in cities, new analysis reveals. 

The study by the Salvation Army warns that areas with lower house prices are unable to properly fund social care, because they cannot raise enough from council tax and business rates. 

Experts said the findings were evidence of a “dementia lottery” which meant the chance of receiving help were a matter of geography. 

The analysis suggests that typically councils in Dorset would have around £5,762 a head to spend on elderly care – while those in Lambeth in London could have more than £31,000 at their disposal. 

Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Somerset, East Sussex, Staffordshire, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire were among other areas with the most limited resources, according to the analysis. All the councils which fared best were in London. 

The trends also show an increasing gulf, with  “spending power” in rural councils falling, while it is rising in urban areas. 

The organisation said it was now having to subsidise places in its own care homes, to the tune of an average £302 per person were week. 

Lieut-Colonel Dean Pallant, of The Salvation Army, said: “Rural local authorities have been set up to fail with this flawed formula and it urgently needs revision. 

“People are living longer and the population is ageing, the adult social care bill is rising but the local authority funding streams aren’t enough to cover the demand, especially in areas where there are not many businesses or people to tax.”

“The Government must prioritise its spending and properly fund adult social care.”

Older people should receive free help to eat, wash and get dressed in a move which would improve their health but need to be funded by a 2p tax rise, a thinktank has said.

The proposal, by the left-of-centre Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), highlights the growing political consensus that personal care should become free for over-65s. If implemented, it would bring England into line with Scotland, where such care has been free since 2002.

The IPPR argues that the key principle underlying access to the NHS – free care at the point of need – should be extended to this element of social care services in England.

Doing so would remove what critics say is a deeply unfair system in which more and more people of pensionable age are having to use their savings to pay for care received at home that is vital to their independence.

The switch would cost an extra £8bn a year by 2030 but could be paid for by raising income tax by 2p or National Insurance by 1.3p, according to calculations in a new IPPR report.

The NHS would save £4.5bn a year by 2030 because older people would be in better health as a result of improved support at home and so would end up in hospital less, it says. Cuts to local council budgets since 2010 have contributed to hospitals becoming routinely full all year round.

Data specialists Gartner predict data volumes will sky-rocket by 800 per cent over the next five years and up to 80 per cent of it will be unstructured. That means a vast collection of web pages, legal documents, medical records, images and the like churned out by individuals, institutions and businesses every second that nobody ever bothers to look at. IDC estimates that less than 1 per cent of the world’s data is ever analysed.

In the big data universe of the future, the biggest threat to traditional democratic values is the collapse of truthful political discourse says Futurologist, Dr James Bellini.

And herein lies the danger: as French law professor Jean-Sylvestre Bergé puts it, the DataSphere is offered up as a benign, politically neutral “holistic comprehension of all the information existing on Earth”. But it is nothing of the sort; it is a new space that invades every corner of daily life, poses challenges to good governance and increasingly conflicts with public administration. It is the world’s newest frontier, without formal controls, management or regulation: Big Brother meets the Wild West.

The government has failed for the sixth time to hit its own deadline to publish details of care system reforms for adults with disabilities and the elderly, because of the Brexit gridlock wracking the Commons.

Charities claimed lives were being put at risk by minsters’ “dithering and delays” and warned vulnerable people denied care, such as those with learning disabilities, were at increased “risk of abuse and neglect”.

Health secretary Matt Hancock told MPs in January that he “intends [to publish] before April” the social care green paper containing the government’s plans to make care safer and financially sustainable.

On Friday the Department of Health and Social Care told the The Independent it had no plans to publish the document before Monday 1 April.

Age UK said this was now the sixth time ministers’ assurances have fallen flat since the originally scheduled publication date of summer 2017 was missed.

One of the country’s biggest providers of agency health workers has been accused of “profiteering” after trying to charge care homes up to £2,700 to supply a staff member for a single shift.

The Guardian can reveal that Newcross Healthcare, already exposed for fining workers £50 when they call in sick, quoted the sky-high charges in a price list sent out to homes looking for cover over Christmas.

Newcross – which supplies thousands of agency health workers to care homes, many of whose residents have their fees paid by local councils – stated that it would be charging triple its normal Sunday day rates to supply staff on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

According to a price list seen by the Guardian, the firm normally charges £76.84 an hour to supply a head of care, also known as a matron, for a Sunday day shift. At triple rates of £230.52 an hour, this would cost a care home £2,766 for a 12-hour shift.

The company also charges £59.12 an hour to supply a nurse for a Sunday day shift. At a triple rate of £177.36 an hour, it would mean a 12-hour shift for a nurse would cost a care home £2,128.

A normal Sunday rate for a senior carer is £30.12, the document states.

A senior Tory MP has dismissed proposals for a “care Isa” after it emerged that ministers were considering a tax-free personal savings scheme to cover the rising costs of caring for an ageing population.

Dr Sarah Wollaston, who chairs the Commons health and social care select committee, said the plans were “a colossal mistake” that would only serve as a solution “for a small minority of wealthy people”.

The policy proposal for the new Isa, to be outlined in the government’s upcoming social care green paper, would allow any unspent funds in the Isa after death to be passed on tax free to the holder’s family.

At present, when an individual dies, any money left in an Isa investment is automatically rolled into their remaining estate, which is potentially subject to the inheritance tax rate of 40%.

By axing inheritance tax on the accounts ministers hope that it would encourage pensioners to hold on to their savings into old age, when they are more likely to need to pay for nursing homes and round-the-clock care.

But Wollaston dismissed the plans, revealed in the Sunday Telegraph, as little more than a way to help the well-off pay for their care needs.

When Jeremy Hunt finally admitted to MPs on Monday evening that the green paper on older people’s social care would not now appear before their summer recess, as he had promised, reaction in the care sector was more weary resignation than righteous anger. Disappointment comes with the territory these days.

The news capped a particularly miserable 48 hours for social care, which had been obliged to stand awkwardly by, empty-handed, while ministers proudly unwrapped the English NHS’s 70th birthday present of an extra £20bn a year in real terms by 2023-24 in return for a new 10-year plan for the service.

Hunt, whose job title was amended in January to health and social care secretary, suggested on the BBC Today programme on Monday morning that social care’s gift was in the post. But as the day wore on, it became ever clearer that it wouldn’t be arriving until after decisions in next year’s spending review, for implementation in 2020. Postponement until the autumn of the policy green paper, already deferred since last year, simply compounded the gloom.

Announcing the further delay, Hunt said: “Whilst the long-term funding profile of the social care system will not be settled until the spending review, we will publish the social care green paper ahead of that.

“However, because we want to integrate plans for social care with the new NHS plan, it does not make sense to publish it before the NHS plan has even been drafted. So we now intend to publish the social care green paper in the autumn around the same time as the NHS plan.”

The green paper was due to set out ideas for the long-awaited reform of care and support of older people in England, following the Conservatives’ own goal on the issue at last year’s general election. In a speech in March, Hunt had spelled out seven principles that would underpin it and promised its publication “before the summer”. Civil servants had been working flat out to deliver it.