£1bn funding gap is revealed in care despite tax increases
Councils make plea for urgent action
UNDER-PRESSURE ADULT social services will face a £1bn funding gap next year despite council tax rises, according to the body representing town hall leaders.
Extra money raised by local authorities will “do little” to stop a decline in standards and the availability of care in England, the Local Government Association (LGA) has warned.
Its warning comes as a report by charity Independent Age suggests the quality of care homes has dropped in one in three local authorities in England, with three areas of Yorkshire among the worst in the country.
Local authorities are able to raise council tax by up to 2.99 per cent in 2019/2020, and by a further two per cent if they provide social care. However, councils cannot exceed an increase of six per cent in the social care levy over three-years from 2017/18.
The LGA estimates that if all councils raised council tax to the maximum level they could, adult social care services would still face a funding gap of at least £1 billion next year to maintain current standards. This figure could rise to £3.6 billion by 2025.
Richard Watts, chairman of the LGA’s resources board, said: “Raising council tax has never been the answer to fixing our chronically underfunded social care system.
“It has raised different amounts of money in different parts of the country, unrelated to need, and risked adding an extra
financial burden on households. Investing in social care is the best way to keep people out of hospital and living independent, dignified lives at home and in the community.
“This is not only good for our loved ones but is proven to alleviate pressure on the NHS. Plugging the immediate funding gap facing adult social care and finding a genuine long-term funding solution must therefore be an urgent priority for the Government.”
Meanwhile, analysis of Care Quality Commission inspection data from January 2019 and January 2018 shows the quality of care homes has worsened in 37 per cent of local authorities.
The drop in performance is steeper than between 2017 and 2018, when it fell by 22 per cent, Independent Age said, but still meant 62 per cent of council areas saw improvements.
In Manchester, 44 per cent of care homes were rated “inadequate” or “requires improvement”, meaning they are failing to deliver the minimum quality of care expected, in January.
Three Yorkshire council areas, Barnsley, Calderdale and Kirklees were in the bottom ten nationwide, with 33.1 per cent and 35.4 per cent of the areas’ care homes in the worst two categories.
And across Yorkshire 23.3 per cent of care homes were poorly-rated, the highest proportion of any English region despite a 2.8 per cent improvement since 2018.
Between 2018 and 2019, only three of the 15 local authorities in Yorkshire responsible for social care saw the quality of their homes decline.
A Government spokesperson said: “We will shortly set out our plans to reform the social care system for adults of all ages to ensure it is sustainable for the future.”
Investing in social care is the best way to keep people out of hospital. Richard Watts, chairman of the LGA’s resources board
IT GOES without saying that the majority of privately and publicly-run care homes in Yorkshire do meet high standards and staff do go out of the way to ensure that residents live with dignity.
Yet this is not a time for complacency. Quite the opposite. This is in spite of recurring financial pressures, repeated delays to the Government’s promised policy paper on social care and fears that staff shortages, already chronic, could be exacerbated by a no-deal Brexit if exemptions are not made for migrants willing to work in this sector.
And it is, therefore, unsurprising that the quality of provision has deteriorated in more than a third of local authorities according to a report released by the Care Quality Committee just two days after Richmond MP Rishi Sunak, a Local Government Minister, told Parliament that the Government “will soon outline its Green Paper and a longer-term sustainable settlement”.
Given that this was first promised nearly two years ago – and that the Green Paper was supposed to have been published by last Autumn – his words will offer scant comfort to all those who remain exercised by the Government’s inertia and inaction on this issue.
Not only are they deeply frustrated by the uncertainty, but more needs to be done to ensure that there is proper recourse when standards of care do, for whatever reason, fall short of the high standards that the elderly – and those unable to look after themselves – should expect, and receive, as a matter of routine.
This was highlighted by the harrowing speech to Parliament last month by Labour backbencher Rosena Allin-Khan over the catalogue of injuries sustained by her father at a council-run care home in London where he is treated for dementia. If educated MPs who know how the system works cannot use their office, and status, to get satisfactory answers, what hope is there for everyone else?