The OakNorth blog

OakNorth’s Ian Fairclough on how AI is reshaping lending decisions for software and technology businesses – and what it means for sponsors and founders raising debt.

Going into residential care is a significant life change. Understanding how your savings are treated before you need to means you can plan ahead, not react under pressure. Here, we cover the basics of how your savings are treated in a care funding assessment in England. The rules differ in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, so if you are based outside England it is worth checking the rules that apply to you specifically.

Last June, at SuperReturn International, the industry’s annual gathering for private equity and credit, the mood around private credit was bullish. Nearly every panel highlighted the relative strength and opportunity in private credit – a golden era, driven by high base rates, public market retreat, and strong LP appetite for yield. 

Today, the tone has shifted sharply. JPMorgan has been marking down the value of software loans sitting in the financing portfolios of private credit clients.

There’s a structural problem at the heart of the UK care sector that’s becoming harder and harder to ignore. The population is ageing, demand for high-quality beds is rising, yet the number of beds actually reaching the market has stayed broadly flat. New homes are being built – but not nearly fast enough, and not always in the right places. Purpose-built, modern care homes represent a small fraction of what’s available today, while an increasingly affluent elderly population is discovering that the stock simply isn’t there to meet their expectations.