A council which piloted the government’s proposed social care funding reforms has revealed major concerns about the scheme, including that it could leave the local authority needing to find tens of millions of pounds every year.
A report to a meeting of North Yorkshire County Council’s care scrutiny committee on Tuesday states the new system, in which an £86,000 cap could be introduced on resident’s care costs, would necessitate recuiting more staff in a sector already facing a recruitment crisis.
While the government has put the scheme on hiatus to help make expected reductions of over £30bn a year in spending to shore up the public finances, Whitehall officials have this week told County Hall bosses charging reform was still government policy and had only been delayed until October 2025.
The scrutiny meeting also comes just days after Healthwatch North Yorkshire called for immediate and significant action to deal with the growing social care crisis and underlined concerns for the future of services in the county.
Its chief officer, Ashley Green, said: “Despite the hard work and commitment from those delivering care and who commission services, the significant lack of qualified and available staff is having a devastating impact on the provision of care for those people who most need it most.”
The council report states the significant increase in the number of social care and financial assessments required with the new system would mean an increase in staffing, which it says would have been difficult to recruit.
The report adds its calculations, echoed by other councils, showed a significant potential gap between funding from the government and costs, running into tens of millions of pounds on an annual basis.
It states: “We made it clear that any final decision on our participation in the Trailblazer project was dependent on central government recognising and filling the funding gap, or at least underwriting any excess costs.”
Outlining the an array of actions the council had launched to ease pressure on the NHS and social care services, the authority’s executive member for adult social care, Councillor Michael Harrison, said: “”We are reliant on the government to champion reform of the sector.”
He said challenges the council faced included increases in hospital discharges, high occupancy in residential care settings resulting in low availability, continuing low availability in the home care sector and an increase in requests to the authority for financial support from social care providers.
He said: “We are operating waiting lists for social care in a way that we probably wouldn’t have done pre-pandemic.
Coun Harrison said positive interventions by the authority had led to some reductions in waiting times, and over the past few months included 41 “hardship” payments, costing £1.8 million, to care providers, compared to just four a year ago.
He said the authority had prevented numerous struggling care homes from closing by dispatching its quality improvement team and through improvements in recruitment, including attracting care workers from overseas and promoting apprenticeships and increasing pay for frontline staff.
Be the first to comment