Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock faced accusations that his government has failed to tackle Britain's social care crisis by failing to publish plans to fix it for over two years.
Mr Hancock admitted after being quizzed by peers that the government's plan to fix Britain's broken care system will not be published until after Brexit .
To laughs Mr Hancock said that the long-awaited social care green paper will be published "in due course".
He told the Lords Economic Affairs Committee that the document, which will outline Government policy on the future of adult social care, was still being worked on by officials.
Humans have to eat less meat to tackle climate change says Ed Miliband
Theresa May said it was time to stop "ducking the issue" two years ago after the Tories first pledged a Green Paper – a preliminary report of government proposals.
But despite those promises no date has been set for it to be published.
A sheepish Mr Hancock told peers: "I'm afraid it has been delayed ... due to Brexit and the need for bandwidth.
"We continue to work on it, and continue to improve it."
He added: "I wish that the green paper had been published by now and we are continuing to work on it in the department because this is such an important issue and has been a long-standing policy problem that needs to be tackled."
Mr Hancock refused to be drawn on if he supported the plans published by Theresa May's former deputy Philip Green this week, which proposed a £300 a year tax hike on the over-50s to help fund social care.
He said: "It depends on what quality of social care we want and what provision we want.
The fact of the finances is that we have put a total of £10 billion into social care over the last three years
"After a period of very tight finances from the spending review that followed the economic crash through to 2015 - there has been a 9% increase since then."
