Adult care time-bomb to decimate funding across popular services

Many popular council services could be “history” by 2020 if social care funding doesn’t get a radical overhaul, according to the Local Government Association.

The amount of money for road maintenance, libraries, leisure centres and other services will have shrunk by 90% as the cost of adult social care and other statutory responsibilities take up nearly all council spending, according to the LGA’s financial projections. Councils will find themselves £16.5bn short in eight years’ time if the situation as it is today doesn’t change. The funding gap starts at £1.4bn for 2012/13.

The growing cost of adult social care will exceed 45% of council budgets by 2019/20, the projections found. Ian O’Donnell, executive director for corporate resources at the London Borough of Ealing, said that his council would continue to see increased need for adult care.

“The inescapable conclusion is that councils like Ealing will quickly reach the point at which they have to scale back on providing other services in order to meet their social care and other statutory obligations and will be rationing limited resources more and more thinly,” he commented. “The damage that this imbalance would do to local communities is all too obvious, and in my view cannot be allowed to happen. Quite simply, local government cannot deal with this issue alone. The government must recognise the scale and significance of this problem and must reprioritise its spending.”

The LGA’s projections are based on conservative estimates of likely cost pressures and an “optimistic assessment” of local government income. They are based on future savings of a similar nature to those already achieved by cost-cutting councils which have seen 200,000 jobs cut. It will be increasingly difficult to make similar savings, the Association pointed out.

O’Donnell agreed: “Ealing has been busy finding savings to enable it to balance the books in this new era of austerity, and a large proportion of the savings has been found through efficiencies,” he said. “However, this cannot continue ad infinitum.”

LGA chairman Merrick Cockell called for an immediate injection of money into the adult care system to meet rising demand in the short term, alongside a major revision of the way it is paid for and delivered in future. “Local government is best placed to ensure care is provided in a way which offers dignity to the individual and value for money for the taxpayer,” he said. “It has to be in a position to do that while also delivering the other services local people expect.”

Talking to Room 151 last week the chief executive of the Association for Public Service Excellence, Paul O’Brien, said: “[Adult social care is] a huge issue and the largest part of councils’ budget – something has to give there. We would like to see a cross party commission looking at the future funding of social care because it is just placing so much strain on all the other services.”

As well as money from the Exchequer to meet short term social care needs the LGA also calls for:
• More clarity on what costs government and public should pay for adult care
• A simpler legal framework
• More integration between health and housing to improve services and efficiency
• Community budgets – used successfully so far in pilots for troubled families – to be extended to more local services.

Cockell added: “The lines on the charts in this report are the converging train tracks that will carry the most immediate and popular public services into history unless the passengers – government, councils and the voters – draw a new map for organising and funding local public service, and draw it now.”

London Councils carried out research last year that found that spending on adult social care in the capital would rise by as much as 20% by 2016/17. The organisation, representing London’s 33 councils, also called for greater collaboration between health and council-based social care services.