01 September 2006
Social care leaders have dismissed the government's claim that there is no need to compensate the sector for the extra responsibilities it has taken on through NHS 'cost shunting'.
In a letter to Public Finance, Richard Murray, Department of Health director of financial planning and allocation, said that the compensation was not needed and that social services already enjoyed flexible resource arrangements and above-inflation funding increases.
But Ray Jones, chair of the British Association of Social Workers, dismissed the DoH statement as 'smoke and mirrors'. He said: 'The government transfers responsibilities and costs over ten years to local councils and then presents this as a windfall of growth in funding.'
Among those transferred responsibilities, Jones listed funding for care placements and personal allowances, which were once paid for out of the social security budget but were absorbed into the general local authority grant in the early part of the decade. He said 2003 changes in the Supporting People grant had similarly transferred responsibilities from central to local government, while also gradually limiting funds.
Jones has led calls for the DoH to provide a one-off emergency grant of around £200m to compensate social services for the extra responsibilities and 'cost shunting' they have been subject to as a result of NHS bodies attempting to cut their own expenditure.
His claims were echoed by a recent Local Government Association survey, which found that 40% of councils in areas hit by NHS deficits said they had been put under extra pressure by NHS cost-saving measures, such as referring patients who would have previously been cared for by the NHS to social service care.
An LGA spokesman also questioned the DoH's statement that social services had benefited from above-inflation grant increases over the past ten years. 'That would be considered generous if local authorities' costs were similar to the consumer price index,' he said.
But independent research on social care inflation rates between 2001/02 and 2003/04 showed an average increase of 5.4%. This was at a time when CPI inflation was about 1.4%.
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