Adult care funding cut by a fifth, says Adass

8 May 13
Councils' adult care budgets have been slashed by £2.7bn – a fifth of their funding – over the past three years, the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services said today.

By Richard Johnstone | 8 May 2013

Councils' adult care budgets have been slashed by £2.7bn – a fifth of their funding – over the past three years, the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services said today.

Adass’s annual survey of members, covering 145 upper-tier authorities in England, indicated that £800m needs to be cut in the current financial year alone. More than £100m of this is set to come from ‘direct withdrawal’ of services.

Around a third of social services directors surveyed said the cuts meant fewer people were now able to access services. Almost half said they were aware of social care providers facing financial difficulties.

Half expected further restrictions on the number of people who would be able to access social care services in two years time, and 57% expected more providers to be in financial difficulty by 2015.

However, the majority of directors agreed that the quality of care provided was holding up. Only around 5% of those polled said care quality had so far suffered, and only 8% believed quality of life for users had been reduced as a result.

Adass president Sandie Keene said the substantial squeeze on funding for services for older people meant an already bleak outlook was becoming even bleaker.

She added: ‘Directors everywhere are well aware of the difficult economic choices the country is facing and having to make. And we are well aware of the enormous help given to our departments by inward transfers of NHS funds.

‘However, taking all these views and developments into consideration, it is absolutely clear that all the ingenuity and skill that we have brought to cushioning vulnerable people as far as possible from the effects of the economic circumstances cannot be stretched any further, and that some of the people we have responsibilities for may be affected by serious reductions in service – with more in the pipeline over the next two years.’

Keene added that the survey underlined the need to overhaul the entire health and social care funding regime.

Today’s Queen’s Speech confirmed plans to implement the central recommendation of the Dilnot commission and introduce a cap on social care costs, to be set at £72,000 from 2016.

However, Keene said there was a need to go further. ‘We continue to need a comprehensive reform of our social care and health system – a reform which brings in and adequately acknowledges the implications of funding change, and which successfully brings together the fully focused and effectively integrated resources of both local authority and NHS services.’

Adult social care spending is estimated to account for around a third of all local government spending, and the Local Government Association said that the funding reductions left the care system ‘in very real danger of collapse’.

Zoe Patrick, chair of the LGA’s community wellbeing board, added: ‘The combined long-term pressures of a rapidly ageing population, increasing costs and a 33% cut to local government budgets means that we need an urgent injection of money to meet rising demand in the short term and radical reform of the way adult social care is paid for and delivered in future, or things will get much worse.’

She said the government’s insistence on protecting the NHS budget was coming at the expense of funding for council-run care services, and was reinforcing inefficiency, costing taxpayers money and reducing the quality of care.

‘For the sake of the most vulnerable members of society, the government needs to examine this issue ahead of the next spending round,’ she added.

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