More funding, more cuts, no explanation

Discontent is growing throughout the social care sector over the number of vulnerable people having the care services they depend on becoming unavailable. Every week the news pages see more local councils announcing price rises, tightening eligibility criteria or else closing day care centres, but for social care the argument is more complex than simply being opposed to austerity. Indeed, the sector can claim to have sounded a more powerful chord of discontent when compared to pensions, police or teacher cuts for example, due to the fact that Central Government’s cuts were not actually supposed fall on social care, being the one issue on which Chancellor George Osborne saw a spending increase as necessary, announcing an extra £2bn funding in last autumn’s Spending Review.

With extra funding allocated for the sector, it is perhaps doubly frustrating to see that local authorities do not appear to be aware of this when reorganising their own budgets. The English Community Care Association are among those who have recently aimed attacks at both Central Government and local authorities for what is happening to elderly care services, with chief executive Martin Green stressing in a recent press release that ‘…when demographics alone would indicate a need for increased funding, we see that care services are bearing a disproportionate level of cuts within local authority budgets,’ with research from the WRVS’s Shaping Our Age project confirming that the issue is a national problem and not isolated to a few rogue councils. No one is disputing that home care provision is being cut, all of which leads to the question of where actually is this £2bn of funding and who is responsible for it not being spent where it should?

Although Government direction on the issue has not been adhered to, the failure will add strength to the Dilnot Commission’s call for a national eligibility criteria, while potentially sparking off wider debates on the negative side of localism and the failure to ring-fence public funds. The care community has suffered in similar fashion before, when millions of pounds allocated to NHS dementia services never materialised, and this further squandering serves as a warning to the Coalition that the care reforms it intends to embark on next year will not be successful through merely appearing to be appropriate, so long as the processes involved are flawed and hold no one accountable.

Details of the Shaping Our Age project can be viewed at the following url: www.wrvs.org.uk/our-impact/involving-older-people