Social care: a future we don’t yet know

Social care: a future we don’t yet know Next month the government will set out its plans for public service spending through to 2020. As John Appleby explained in his recent blog, the likely outlook is likely to be the largest sustained fall in NHS spending as a share of GDP in any period since 1951. But what about social care?

Care services minister Alistair Burt recently told local authority chiefs that ‘funding is still unclear…I will find out what the funding is when you find out, when the Chancellor stands up in Westminster to deliver the Autumn Statement.’ While we are waiting, our analysis of past trends and future projections for social care makes disturbing reading.

In the 15 years to 2009, local authority net spending on adult social care for all age groups increased by an average of almost 6 per cent a year over and above inflation (figure 1). But because social care forms part of local government spending – which, unlike the NHS, was not ring-fenced in the 2010 Spending Review – this trend has reversed sharply over the past five years. Spending has dropped by an average of 2.2 per cent a year since 2009.

Money has been transferred from the NHS budget to social care (reaching £1 billion last year), which has helped a bit. Without this, the real-terms fall would have been 3.6 per cent. Most of this transferred money came from the NHS’s average annual real-terms increase of 0.84 per cent. Understandably, many are worried about further reliance on an increasingly cash-strapped NHS to prop up social care. The King's Fund