Mark Andrews: Passwords, smiley pensioners and paperless councils can't mask crisis in social care

"We're going paperless" my local authority informs me, in a jaunty email featuring a silver-haired man grinning inanely at his phone. If there is one thing I have learned in life, it is never to trust a man who derives that much pleasure from staring at his phone. And if he tells you  'I'm just checking my council tax', don't believe a word of it. 

At the moment, the council is merely 'offering' the option to send me my bill over the worldwide web, but I think we all know which way this is heading. Give it a couple of years, following a relentless campaign to get people signed up, they will be telling us how 'most people now prefer to manage their bills online' - yeah, right  - and will start charging for the privilege of getting a letter in the post telling us how much money they are screwing us for.

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It's not that I'm a technophobe - I still don't have a computer, but I've had a smart phone for several years now, which is how they are able to email me. It's more that I don't think I can cope with another password. Or more specifically, a password of 'eight or more characters, including upper-case and lower-case letters, at least two numerals, and a special character'. Which has to be updated every three months, and which can't be repeated. How do people keep thinking up these passwords, let alone remembering them all? 

And for what? I'm all for protecting my money, which is why I won't touch internet banking with a bargepole. But if anyone wants to hack into my account and pay my council tax, well be my guest. 

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Of course, the real reason is nothing to do with people 'preferring to manage their bills online', it's because the councils are too skint to pay the printing and postage. Which, in turn, is a direct consequence of the elephant in the room which nobody dares challenge, the cost of adult social care. For many authorities, this is taking up 80 per cent of their budgets.

This problem, which has been kicked into the long grass by successive governments, isn't going to go away. Theresa May made a timid attempt to face up to it, and was clobbered at the ballot box. Telling people they will need to taka a cut in their standard of living to finance their old age is not what they want to hear. So the can was kicked a little further down the road.

Since then, politicians on all sides have just thrown in a few million here and there, muttered a few platitudes, and left it for a future government to deal with. 

But you can't live on the never-never forever. Sooner or later, the chickens are going to come home to roost, and the consequences will be too awful to contemplate. The winter fuel payments debacle will seem like a walk in the park by comparison.