The future of adult social care in Britain is bleak and government proposals to ensure the sector remains adequately funded do “little more than paper over the cracks”, a leading thinktank has said.
Despite a pledge from George Osborne that social care could expect a cash boost through local authorities raising council tax, the International Longevity Centre said there would not be enough money to meet the needs of a growing older population.
Around one in five people aged 50 or over lived on their own in England, an ILC-UK study found. The research, supported by Age UK, claimed data from 326 local authorities showed that those council areas in which most older people and unpaid carers lived would be the ones to raise the least money from the chancellor’s council tax plan.
The 2% hike was announced as part of a £3.5bn investment package for adult social care, but the ILC-UK said it was “highly unlikely” this would come to pass.
Ben Franklin, head of economics of an ageing society at ILC-UK, said: “The future for adult social care looks bleak. The social care settlement will be insufficient to meet the growing care needs of an ageing population and does little more than paper over the cracks which many of those who are in need of care are already falling through.”
The report, The End of Formal Adult Social Care?, warned of a polarisation of care in the future, with one section of society able to afford private formal care and another relying on family or other informal care.
Caroline Abrahams, the charity director of Age UK, said the findings should be a wake-up call, adding that women could be worst affected by the “dismantling [of] our system of social care”.
“This report reinforces the consensus among experts that the measures the government announced in the spending review will not be enough to arrest the further decline of social care in this country,” she said. “As such it is a wake-up call for the public, women especially, because they make up most family carers. Over the last 20 years, the need to provide a system of childcare has been first recognised and then at least partially met, in order to enable more women to work and support decent family incomes.
“Now many of those same women, or sometimes their mothers, could find they have to leave work to care for their own ageing parents, because we are effectively dismantling our system of social care. This is the wrong political and economic choice and it will hurt older people and their families.”
A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: “We have given local authorities access to an extra £3.5bn in social care to ensure they can support older and vulnerable people in their area.
“In particular, the increased and improved Better Care Fund will offer support to councils with greater demands for their social care services, on top of the funds they raise through the precept. We will continue to work with the care sector to help it to provide quality care for older and vulnerable people.”
