Small sacrifice must social welfare crisis
Leading Welsh economist Gerald Holtham and entrepreneur Tegid Roberts give their views on how to solve the social welfare situation in Wales
Social care, particularly for the elderly, faces a serious squeeze in Wales – not to say a crisis. Local authority spending per older person has declined over the past seven years by around 13%, according to Joseph Ogle, research assistant, and Michael Trickey, programme director, at Wales Public Services 2025.
The latest figures for annual local authority spending on social services for the over-65s are just under £0.55bn (2016-17 prices).
The proportion of elderly people in the population requiring residential care is projected to rise by 82% by 2035 and the proportion requiring non-residential care to rise by 67%.
Expenditure overall will need to rise by 75-80% to account for that – and if the recent deterioration in spending per head is to be reversed, spending would need to double.
That is consistent with the finding of the Health Foundation, which concluded that adult social care funding would need to rise by 4% in real terms each year for most of the next two decades. Meanwhile, the Welsh budget under austerity will grow much slower than that.
Absence of adequate social care provision not only leads to suffering in itself, but often shows up as a crisis in the health service – because elderly people with chronic conditions end up in hospital and stay there, since there is nowhere where they can be safely discharged.
That creates a pressure on available beds, triggering problems elsewhere in the health system. It also results in time-consuming, souldestroying haggling over resources between health and care service personnel. Small sacrifice With a small sacrifice, Wales can tackle this problem via a system of enhanced social insurance. A very