Over half a year into a new Government and we've heard many encouraging things about health and social care change.
November 2024 saw the policy paper, Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive set out the Government's strategy to ensure opportunities are afforded for all of our children. We also welcomed the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill and see this as a big step forward for children's social care. The Government has also announced an independent commission into adult social care.
This is welcome news for struggling councils and providers, but Government reform is never a quick process.
While we hope this time is different and the major wide-scale reform required is delivered, solutions are needed now to ensure sustainability of both commissioning authorities and care providers. But commissioning authorities are currently stood on a burning platform, and every penny has to be directed to the right area.
In most of the areas we work in, services for older people need more money as they have been underfunded for a number of years, as highlighted in the Fair Cost of Care Exercise in 2022.
We are also seeing growing demand and complexity in working age adult services which in turn leads to increasing costs to commission and deliver services.
Children's services have featured heavily in the press and while many providers are delivering outstanding services, in some cases the cost of delivering services is nowhere near the price being charged for placements. Placement costs can regularly reach up to £15,000 per week per child, and a small number of these severely impact other council services and financial viability. To help solve this, there has to be a rebalancing of the funding to make sure it is allocated to the right areas and controlled in the best possible way.
Our care pricing tool, CareCubed, was created to deliver a low-cost solution and immediate benefits. Yes, it can help achieve efficiencies, but it can also help redirect limited budgets into the right pots. It uses robust data and evidence to provide a benchmark cost for services and individual placements based on need – and will reflect recent changes.
Balancing the budget across older people, working age adults and children and young people is going to be critical to keep councils functioning and will reduce the chances of the health and social care system and other council services more widely from collapsing.
Craig White is Commercial Director of CareCubed
