A long-term care specialist adviser has reported a noticeable dip in enquiries following the government announcement of the care cap plans.
Nicky Cave, senior consultant and managing director at the firm Eldercare, said rather than raise awareness of the funding issues the announcement had led consumers to believe the state would cover them.
She said: "The details have not come out yet but the headline announcements are open to interpretation and people may now think that they no longer have to worry about this.
"It has been a ridiculously quiet quarter and we can only assume that is because people think they are covered when they are not."
Grace Consulting, a firm that offers independent care advice to compliment financial advice, said it had not noticed any changes in advisers working with it.
But chairman Chris Cain added that adviser numbers were going up generally with a notable trend of increasing long-term care specialists within large national IFA firms.
He said: "We have not seen a great change since the care cap announcement but that is because we are a port of call when people have already hit crisis point. There is no change in people needing care and that is going up all the time.
"Sadly people are not informed and are just mystified by the whole process. The problem now is that people will think government is sorting the issue and will get a nasty shock when they come to face the detail."
He said the cap details needed to be made clear but may not happen because explaining that the care cap would not help most people would be hard for the government to say.
Jon Plant, owner of advice firm First Service Financial, who outsources long-term care enquiries to another advice firm, said there was a huge amount of mis-information in the press and public domain.
Plant added that the way the cap announcement had been portrayed suggested to consumers that they were covered in the event of care.
