- Local authority income from central government has declined by £16,000,000,000 since 2011
- Local authority budgets have been declining for 8 years
- Local authorities still don’t know what their budgets will look like in 2020 so can’t plan properly
- 80% of councils fear for their financial stability
- The impact of these cuts is being encountered in every area part of their work including children’s services, housing, social care and economic development.
- 40% of councils intend to further reduce their spending on adult social care next year.
Cutting adult social care means long waiting lists before help can be provided for people with drug, alcohol or mental health problems. The impact on the individuals and families concerned is enormous. Getting someone off drugs depends on reacting very quickly when the will and determination is there. Telling someone they might get help in six months is incredibly damaging as their circumstances are highly likely to have spiralled downwards during the wait. For wider society the impact on crime figures is considerable as one of the major causes of crime is the search for funding to service a drug or alcohol problem.
That is bad enough but when you come to consider the needs of the elderly or the long term disabled then the impact of the cuts becomes even more obvious. If an old person has a fall and needs to go into hospital they are likely to be treated and ready to leave within days. Increasingly they can’t leave hospital because they are not able to look after themselves at home and all the places in council care homes are full. The impact on the NHS has been to block up 5% of all beds with care patients and to create much of the extra pressure on A & E units when people who have tried to cope at home come back when they fail. Old people’s homes are closing despite demand going up because local authorities can’t afford to pay enough to cover the costs. 30% of all staff in care homes left their job last year because the pay is so low and the conditions so bad. Most old people like staff they know and are familiar with – yet almost one in every 3 members of staff will be new and inexperienced.
At the last election the Conservatives came up with at least 3 completely different policy announcements about how they were going to handle the social care crisis. Policy was made up on the hoof in the middle of the campaign and contradictory statements were made from one day to the next. Eventually they tried to wriggle out of the public concern by promising a review of policy.
That review seems to have disappeared into the long grass and been forgotten about. A tiny amount of new money - £350 million was widely publicised by the Conservatives. They don’t like to mention the further round of cuts that is now being imposed and which were not flagged up at any stage during the campaign. All the sound bites were about efficiently combining health and care services. The reality is that an acute lack of funding of care is now dragging down the NHS and integrated problem solving is a pipe dream in an atmosphere of austerity and short-term fire-fighting.
That is what we have come to expect from this government. All their energies have gone into fighting with each other over Brexit. Meanwhile they are presiding over a slow-motion car crash of service after service that is run by local authorities.
The best run and most business-like local authorities have been furiously cutting services, putting up rates and charging for things that they used to do for free and are still struggling to stay afloat. The worst run ones are close to bankruptcy. Conservative Northamptonshire County Council has had to freeze all new spending that it isn’t forced to make by law. An independent report has found that it has “no robust and deliverable plans for its long term financial stability”.
Perhaps Theresa May would like to explain to us all why a Conservative run local authority is in such a mess and why hundreds of other Conservative Councils are desperately worried about the future. Or explain to elderly people waiting for care services what her policy actually is this week about how much they need to pay and where they are going to get the service? Or better still get out of the way and let someone who actually cares about running the country efficiently get on with the job instead of someone who is solely concerned with patching together a divided party and surviving another bad day.