Spending Review 2015 adult social care

London Councils' adult social care response to Spending Review 2015

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London Councils has made a formal submission to the Treasury on the Spending Review 2015 (SR 2015), this paper focuses specifically on our asks around adult social care funding.

We believe that the Spending Review must be seized as an opportunity to address the challenges facing social care if health and social care are to remain sustainable over the next five years. For a sustainable health and care system the SR15 must therefore address the following issues:

  • If councils are to meet their statutory obligations to support and meet the needs of vulnerable people, the SR15 must commit to fully fund social care. At a minimum, the Spending Review must not only fund the additional pressures arising from increased demand, but must also fully fund the new burdens pressures. We have identified the total funding gap in 2019/20 to be over £900 million and a cumulative total of £2.4 billion over the period 2016/17 - 2019/20.
  • With the implementation of phase one of the Care Act 2014, the reform of social care has already commenced. Government must now work with the sector to ensure that it is on a sustainable footing and ready to implement phase two of the Care Act 2014 by April 2020.
  • Many of the challenges facing the social care sector are as a direct result of the sector’s heavy dependency on the public purse. Government must work with the private sector to increase people’s ability to contribute to their own care so as to ease the pressure and reliance on the state purse. The development of a national market for financial products that will provide people with choice and options for saving for their old age should be one of the priorities over this period.
  • Government must set out a framework within which local government and health partners will be incentivised to make speedy and ambitious progress towards full integration by the end of the Spending Review period.

The full document is available to download on the left.