It will be a new community within a new neighbourhood. As part of the 4,000-home Mountfield Park development near Canterbury, Kent, there are plans to build a village that will have its own homes, shops and cafes. All of the residents will be people with dementia. It is being modelled on Hogeweyk, a dementia village near Amsterdam, whose inhabitants live in shared houses, have a supermarket, park cafe, cinema, village squares and gardens, as well as round-the-clock care if they need it. “What struck us was how unrecognisable the lives of those with dementia were at Hogeweyk compared with those I’ve met in England,” Simon Wright, the chief executive of developers Corinthian Land, told the Times.

“A lot of nursing homes are based on a medical approach,” says Frank van Dillen, co-founder of Dementia Village Advisors and one of the architects who designed Hogeweyk. “We try to de-institutionalise that approach because people want to live as normally as possible.” So there is care and medication, but also everyday activities: “You want to go to a restaurant, do your own grocery shopping, sit in a bar, walk outside and meet people.”

In 2015, the Life Changes Trust initially funded 12 dementia friendly communities over three years which have now developed into a further 82. To date, more than 3,400 people with dementia and 2,000 carers have directly benefited from being part of a dementia friendly community.

These communities provide a structure and culture that make it possible for people affected by dementia to do things that matter to them, remain integrated and active in their own communities and participate in decisions that affect their day-to-day lives.

This new investment of £2.5million will support 14 new communities, as well as providing some longer-term support for previously funded communities.

Scotland is leading the way in understanding how communities that are dementia friendly work best.

As well as providing information, support and opportunities, they draw on the abilities that people with dementia still have so they can contribute to their communities. They currently involve people with dementia aged from 39 to 104.

Current projects include:

• Stornoway – people with dementia in care homes have been sharing their knowledge of local stories, anecdotes and now-unused objects in order to preserve local history and leave a legacy for the local community, museums and researchers.
• A dementia friendly musical theatre community is run by Centrestage in Kilmarnock.
• Glasgow Film Theatre is offering monthly “Movie Memories” film screenings to make sure that people with dementia are not excluded from the cinema-going community.
• The British Deaf Association is raising awareness of living with hearing loss and dementia, providing resources.
• Table Tennis Scotland supports people with dementia so they can still keep playing the sport they love or take it up as a new way of keeping fit.
• New funding was also awarded to Scottish Ballet, Regional Screen Scotland, Edinburgh Leisure, Dementia Friendly Highlands, Dementia Orkney, the Forget-Me-Not Club in Banchory, Dementia Friendly Uists, Dementia Friendly Pentlands, Stirling and Forth Valley Dementia Friendly Neighbourhoods and care home communities in East Ayrshire and Kelso.

The NHS specifies that everyone diagnosed with the condition should have an individual care plan that is reviewed at least once a year.

But Age UK found that as of November, out of the 458,461 people with a recorded diagnosis of dementia, only 282,573 had a new care plan or at least one care plan review on record in the previous 12 months.

The charity describes the plans, which set out the tailored support someone should receive and should be updated in line with the progression of the disease in the individual, as “the gateway to follow-up support from the NHS”.

With the number of people with dementia in the UK forecast to rise from 850,000 in 2015 to 1 million by 2025, Age UK warned a failure to provide the plans will hamper the ability of the growing number of people with the disease to live in the community.

Caroline Abrahams, Age UK’s charity director, said: “Our analysis suggests that many people with dementia are losing out on the NHS follow-up support they need and are supposed always to be offered, once they have received their diagnosis.

The shadow social care minister has called on Conservative MPs to renounce the so-called “dementia tax”, proposed in the party’s election manifesto, before a debate in parliament on the social care crisis.

The Labour party will hold an opposition day debate on Wednesday which will include a vote on ditching the Conservative manifesto proposal, which would leave people with a maximum of £100,000 of assets after care costs.

Tory MPs described the plans as deeply unpopular on the doorsteps and the proposals were widely considered to have been dropped after the election result. However, the junior health minister Jackie Doyle-Price recently resurrected the idea of asking people to contribute more to the cost of care, saying people’s homes should not be seen “as an asset to give to their offspring”.

The shadow social care minister, Barbara Keeley, said the party would call on the government in the debate on Wednesday to confirm it did not plan to proceed with the dementia tax when it publishes a green paper on social care next year.

“There has been a deafening silence since the general election but we cannot have that,” she said. “People are unhappy, unsettled and extremely worried that this is coming round the corner. They don’t know what they can afford, they don’t know what they can save and they need certainty as they look forward, and that goes for older people and working people.”

The NHS and social care system in the UK is facing a staggering increase in the cost of looking after elderly people within the next few years, according to major new research which shows a 25% increase in those who will need care between 2015 and 2025.

Within eight years, there will be 2.8 million people over 65 needing nursing and social care, unable to cope alone, says the research – largely because of the toll of dementia in a growing elderly population. The research, published by the respected Lancet Public Health medical journal, says cases of disability related to dementia will rise by 40% among people aged 65 to 84, with other forms of disability increasing by about 31%.

The new figures follow a furore over the Conservative manifesto and Theresa May’s U-turn on social care this week. In a bid to keep the costs of care down, the manifesto said those needing care at home would have to pay until they had £100,000 in savings left, including the cost of their home.

After accusations that the Conservatives were imposing a “dementia tax”, May promised a cap on the amount any person would pay for care – although without specifying what the cap would be.

The new analysis will make grim reading for whichever party gains power. “The societal, economic and public health implications of our forecast are substantial,” say the researchers, led by academics from the University of Liverpool and University College London.

Farmers and other rural residents are reluctant to seek crucial help to cope with the devastating onset of dementia in their families for a whole variety of reasons, according to new research by academics. In what is thought to be the first major study by a UK university into the impact of dementia specifically in farming and rural communities, researchers say a perception prevails in the countryside of support for people living with dementia being urban-focused and inappropriate for those who have lived and worked outdoors all their lives. Pride, a tradition of self-reliance and the desire for privacy often prevent people from asking for help, the study found. Helen Benson, regional co-ordinator of the Farming Community Network whose volunteers support farming families with health issues, said: “Our farming communities look after their elderly residents within the farming family probably more than any other sector.”

If suffering from dementia wasn’t enough of a struggle, patients are also forced to spend £22,000 a year on healthcare costs, according to new research.

The Alzheimer’s Society found that private individuals are shouldering roughly two thirds of the cost of dementia healthcare.