Community Budgets should be extended to all local authorities in England to ensure that town halls and the NHS better integrate the provision of adult social care services, a cross-party group of MPs have said.
Credit: Berna Namoglu / Shutterstock
The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Local Government has found councils face a funding gap of £634m in adult social care over the next two years. This is set to grow unless ‘fundamental reforms’ of the system are agreed.
Today’s report has urged the government to reach agreement on the future of care funding by 2015 to avoid the system being placed on the ‘critical list’.
Last week, ministers published reform plans for social care, but confirmed that proposals on how to fund the system will not be made until the next Comprehensive Spending Review, a date for which has yet to be confirmed. Current spending plans run up to April 2015.
The all-party inquiry, which took evidence from more than 80 organisations including local authorities, care providers and user groups, found the gap in funding amounted to 4.4% per annum. Both central and local government initiatives to invest in prevention and service redesign were only achieving savings of 4.1% per annum.
The MPs called on both councils and Whitehall to further build on the ‘already substantial progress’ that has been made towards better cooperation between services. Care budgets need to be integrated to ensure there is a ‘change [in] the focus of social care services and spending towards prevention’.
The group called for Community Budgets to be implemented in all local authority areas to help ensure this happens.
Four ‘whole place’ community budget pilots, which pools all local public spending into a single pot to better address local needs, are currently being developed. Pooling social care funding would also allow town halls to ‘focus on health prevention’, the MPs said.
The report also called for local health and wellbeing boards, which are being established as part of he government’s health service reforms, to be given more powers to challenge the national NHS Commissioning Board. The commissioning board should also be given a duty to cooperate with the local health and wellbeing boards in the exercise of its functions, specifically in relation to the promotion of integration and collaborative working.
Both the NHS and local authorities should be required to make an annual statement of all adult social care expenditure, so health and wellbeing boards can scrutinise and challenge the choices made.
Inquiry chair, the Conservative MP Heather Wheeler, said: ‘At a local level social care is a massive issue both because of the quality of care delivered, but also the cost of care. People know a lot more because of the Dilnot report, but there were so many unanswered questions.
‘We felt that although there needs to be a long-term solution we have also found a short- and medium-term solution to close the funding gap and provide decent adult social care for our residents. This is an important reply to the white paper and I hope the government takes our proposals forward.’
