The cost of social care crisis will hit all of us in the pocket...

MOST people don’t think about social care until a family member needs help with personal care in their home or can no longer manage to live independently and requires residential or nursing care.

But it is an urgent issue for all of us because councils are obliged by law to provide social care, without sufficient resources to pay for it. So councils, like Staffordshire County Council, allocate two thirds of their total spending on social care, with 42 per cent spent on adult social care alone. That means less money is left for highways, support for our town centres, public health services and for the voluntary sector on which we increasingly rely. So, as our council tax is hiked up, our services are being cut back.

On Wednesday, Rishi Sunak, above, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, will deliver his Autumn Budget, giving details of his Government’s plans for public spending over the coming years. Councils will be hoping for some good news on additional funding as they are still faced with making cuts running into millions of pounds despite increasing demands for care.

In September, the Prime Minister finally announced after years of delay that there would be a cap of £86,000 on social care costs. Problem solved, crisis averted? Sadly not.

A survey of directors of social services has reported an avalanche of need as thousands of people lost their independence during the covid pandemic. So there is a huge backlog of 54,000 people waiting for assessment, with 7,000 having waited over six months just to overcome the first hurdle to access support.

The NHS now faces a beds crisis as care homes suffering unprecedented staff shortages are forced to stop taking patients from hospitals, just as the NHS is desperately trying to free up space to tackle a backlog of 5.6 million people – the equivalent of almost one in 10 people in England – awaiting treatment.

Care homes in England are facing the biggest staff shortage on record with 105,000 positions unfilled. Staff refusing covid vaccinations, required for work in social care, will no longer be working in the sector. One in five care workers in Stoke-on-trent have not yet had two jabs. That is on top of a slump in foreign staff coming over to fill care vacancies.

Others have just opted for a less stressful life outside social care, turning instead to supermarkets and hospitality for work. Who can blame them?

The Prime Minister’s plan takes the first steps towards reforming social care but does nothing to meet the full costs of social care, does not tackle the low pay and poor conditions for social care staff and provides no certainty for councils trying to plan the delivery of better quality care and greater access to much needed services. Councils will have to wait until January 2022 to know what funding is coming their way for care costs. This plan does not even fulfill the PM’S promise of avoiding the sale of people’s homes to meet care costs!

Healthcare spending is vital to wellbeing and to life expectancy. Research by the University of York analysed the joint impact of cuts to healthcare, public health and social care since the Conservatives came into government in 2010. In the following four years, the spending squeeze was linked with over 57,500 more deaths than would have been expected without the cuts. There was also a slowdown in the rate of improvement in life expectancy, with the worst hit areas being urban areas in the north.

We need a properly funded national care service with free personal care on a par with the NHS 10-year plan, an end to rushed 15-minute care visits with care workers being paid for travel time between appointments, and increased public sector provision so we do not have to rely so heavily on an increasingly fragile private sector care market. Such a solution, sadly, is a long way off.