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The Government's ambition to create a National Care Service presents a significant opportunity to rethink how care is delivered. Prevention, integration, workforce reform and greater consistency are all worthy goals. The ambition is hard to argue with, but the success depends on the resilience of today's system.Adult social care faces a unique challenge. Unlike many public services, it is statutory, demand-led and heavily influenced by factors beyond the direct control of local authorities.Councils cannot choose when residents require care, nor can they easily reduce demand when financial pressures increase. Demographic change, increasing complexity of need, workforce shortages and provider costs continue to drive expenditure upwards.Yet despite these pressures, councils remain expected to manage social care through annual budget-setting processes that assume financial challenges can be addressed within a single year. Increasingly, that assumption looks detached from reality.Recent evidence from the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services highlights the scale of the challenge.Eighty per cent of councils overspent their adult social care budgets in 2025-26, creating a collective overspend of £715m. At the same time, councils are expected to deliver a further £909m of savings despite limited confidence that these can be achieved.The pressures facing the sector are no longer isolated or temporary. They are becoming structural.This creates a difficult contradiction. Councils are simultaneously expected to control spending, transform services, improve outcomes and invest in prevention, all while managing growing demand and financial uncertainty.The result is a cycle that has become familiar across local government. As financial pressures increase, preventative services become harder to sustain. Needs become more acute, demand rises further and costs continue to grow. Instead of creating the conditions for transformation, the system often finds itself concentrating on short-term survival.This is not transformation. It is survival.Government already recognises that some public services require different financial approaches when faced with structural challenges. NHS organisations are often supported through multi-year recovery arrangements, reflecting the reality that systemic pressures cannot always be resolved within a single financial year.Similarly, flexibilities have previously been introduced in response to growing special educational needs and disabilities deficits within local government.Adult social care has reached a similar point.This is not an argument for unchecked spending or permanent financial support. Rather, it is about recognising the difference between operational failure and structural demand pressures. Many of the factors driving social care costs sit beyond the direct control of individual councils and are shared across wider health and care systems.The issue is not whether local government should receive special treatment. The real question is whether a demand-led public service supporting millions of people can continue to be governed through annual financial mechanisms when the pressures it faces are structural and long-term.That distinction matters because social care reform will not happen overnight. Even once the Casey Review reports, any National Care Service will take years to design, legislate for and implement.The question is whether the current system can remain sustainable throughout that transition. One possible answer is the creation of a time-limited Adult Social Care Transition Framework. Such an approach could provide councils facing demonstrable structural pressures with access to multi-year recovery arrangements linked to clear reform and improvement plans.Importantly, responsibility should be shared. Social care outcomes are shaped not only by local government but also by NHS partners, strategic authorities and central government. A successful transition framework should therefore align accountability across the wider system rather than placing the burden entirely on councils.Done properly, such an approach could provide greater visibility of financial risks, reduce reliance on emergency support arrangements and create the stability needed for long-term reform.Ultimately, the debate about adult social care should not simply be about what replaces today's system. It should also be about how that system remains viable while change is developed and implemented.To enable the Government's ambition of creating a National Care Service and rewiring the state, the management of financial risk must be part of the conversation.Without a credible transition mechanism, there is a danger that councils become trapped in cycles of annual crisis management precisely when they need the capacity to innovate, prevent and transform.The biggest question facing policy-makers may not be what a National Care Service looks like in 10 years' time. It may be how we keep today's social care system sustainable long enough to make that ambition a reality, because before we can cross into the future of social care, we first need to build a bridge over the troubled water of the present.Colin Ansell is chief executive of Southend City Council

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ADULT SOCIAL CARE

Local councils: Funding the transition to care reform

By Colin Ansell | 19 October 2026

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