ADASS President’s NCASC 2024 Speech

Introduction and thanks

To NCASC 2024 on behalf of ADASS, ADCS, and the LGA. I am Melanie Williams, President of ADASS.

ADASS has organised the programme this year, the convention is that we open the conference, and it’s my pleasure to do so today. Welcome conference.

This week we come together to collaborate, learn, and exchange stories, as we explore how to achieve the vision for us all –

where we all live in a place we call home, with the people and things we love. Where we look out for one another. Doing the things that matter to us.

About conference

Our goal for this conference is to build a programme that enables you to reflect, connect, and ultimately take ideas and energy back to your workplaces and communities.

We also hope to influence a few key people along the way, and I encourage you to engage with our political leaders and policy makers who are joining us this week.

This conference has an important role in amplifying our experiences and voices.

The voices of people with lived experience of social care, those of us in Local Government, and importantly the rich and varied ways that social care supports people day in, day out, and round the clock.

Key themes

And what are some of the key themes that we will be exploring? Well, I’m sure you’d all agree that 2024 is presenting some challenging times for us.

Some people have moved past the pandemic and life has recovered. But for others in social care, Covid had a deep impact and has cast a shadow that still looms large over lives, even today.

Not just in terms of ill health and loss of loved ones, but also a loss of personal confidence and wellbeing. This has had a huge impact.

Inequality has widened.

Rights have been eroded.

Meanwhile, as leaders, we are facing a context where confidence in public services is at an all-time low.

This comes, unfortunately, at a moment when the strain on public service is at an all-time high.

We know that access to, and quality of, social care support varies greatly from place to place.

We know the time for reform is now, yet change takes a long time to come.  

Like the legacy of covid, the cost-of-living crisis is still being felt keenly. Many of the people we support are impacted by increasing poverty.

We also know that health and wellbeing for those with protected characteristics is worse than for others.

Demand for adult social care

We are asked to support around two million people each year, and over all provide support to around 1.5mn people. We want to be able to support these people in a timely way, being flexible in crisis and working in partnership.

This doesn’t happen for everyone and that isn’t acceptable.

We must also acknowledge the incredible role played by carers. Many people love, support, and care for someone who relies upon social care.

Around a million of the 6 million carers we have seek additional support from Local Government, and we know that carers are also feeling the strain.  

Financial outlook

I need to talk about the money.

We cannot vision for a tomorrow when the cost of today has become so insurmountable. The budget had catastrophic impacts on the cost of Adult Social Care. Not just for Local Government, but also for out important partners who support people in their neighbourhoods and places in our voluntary and community sector. 

Our latest survey demonstrated that this year we see yet more overspend in adult social care budgets.

At ADASS, we think that next year, the increase in NIC, NLW and inflation will cost us a further £1.8 billion. This does not include the cost to our wider social care sector.

Quite frankly, if Adult Social Care had almost 2 billion pounds spare, we would be implementing charging reform and building a really decent early help and prevention service in all of our places. Should we end up having to give a big chunk of this money to Government, the consequences are unimaginable on our ability to meet need.

Case Study

Moving away from the money for a moment, I’ve spoken in the past about my firm belief that social care is a social justice issue.

I want to take this opportunity to tell you a story that highlights this.

This year, I supported a friend of mine who did not know how to support his parents. He was estranged from them and was stepping back in to their relationship after years of estrangement. Both were admitted to hospital. Different hospitals I might add. My team were supporting their hospital discharge.

His dad had lifelong mental health problems, and at times was controlling and aggressive. Now facing his last few weeks of life.

Mum spent much of her time sitting in the chair and was cared for by his Dad, although that care in recent months had led to a serious infection and sadly was not enough to keep her well.

Professionals had concerns about the safety of their living conditions, and indeed health colleagues had the view that the risk of them living together was too great.

The family had been urged to find separate care homes miles apart. But they both wanted to spend these last few weeks together. The family didn’t know who to listen to.

Our Social Worker bought people together and spent time considering the differing views about what was right. Importantly, what they individually wanted.

They died within weeks of leaving hospital and within days of each other. But they died following time in a care home together, supported with love, care and compassion.

This is what social care is all about.

At its best social care can be about love and joy, enabling people to thrive, and achieve the amazing things they want to do.

At other times, it’s there when people have nowhere else to turn. Where our role is to speak up for people, and advocate for human rights.

Social care is about the thousands of relations that take place every day between people. We have 1.5 million people in our workforce and the core task of leadership is to create the conditions for those relationships to flourish.

Conference programme

We have a session on workforce in our brilliant programme, where delegates can hear about the adult social care workforce strategy that was developed by Skills for Care – with the support of many of us.

We also have several sessions planned that focus on practice. I’m really pleased to be part of one called ‘some love man’, where we consider how we make safeguarding personal for people who are homeless and balance rights, capacity, and risk.

We also have sessions that focus on direct payments, supporting adults with autism in innovative ways, and, strength-based approaches. 

I am really pleased that at NCASC it is now established practice to place peoples’ stories firmly on our agenda and at every ADASS session people who draw upon care and support build the sessions with us, share the stage with us, and shape key messages with us.

The Big Chats are a huge success and I encourage you to make the most of that opportunity to listen to those who draw on care and support, and appreciate what they are saying.

A ‘national care service’

Considering themes of equity, personalisation, this Government has made a manifesto commitment to a National Care Service.

We welcome the debate about how a more centralised approach can also enable greater devolution to people and places, advance personalisation, and self-directed support, and, at the same time as delivering a more equitable and fair adult social care service.

A key element is to address fair funding for both local government and social care, as we know that underpins the assets and resources in our places. Fair funding underpins our ability to commission for better outcomes. Fair funding enables our providers to deliver with fair pay and conditions.

There is a commitment to improving the pay, terms and conditions of care workers through a Fair Pay Agreement and we welcome this.

ADASS has called for fair pay for some time, but it must be part of a suite of interventions where locally and nationally we value our people. This includes increasing apprenticeships, enabling parity of esteem between social care workers and NHS staff, and developing clear career pathways to recruit and retain more staff.

It’s so important to grow our social workers, occupational therapists, and leaders. These are all areas we want to see as part of this work.

That’s why we are delighted that this week, we will welcome the Minister of State for Care, Stephen Kinnock MP, to our conference.

Like the Secretary of State for health and social care, Wes Streeting, he has talked about the value of Adult Social Care. We welcome this acknowledgement and that they see the health mission as one of economic growth and investment.

This is consistent with our call to recognise the economic contribution that Adult Social Care makes – more than £50billion nationally – and is certainly worthy to feature in any industrial strategy or economic development plans that take shape.

10 year plan

Wes Streeting has talked about a 10-year plan for Adult Social Care sitting alongside the 10-year plan for the NHS.

Excitingly, Sally Warren, who is working on that health plan, is joining us on Friday to set out the key areas in the plan and how social care and NHS interface will be reflected.

This is core to what we want: in our Spring Survey, Directors talked about the NHS and Social Care relationship becoming more tense and tilted towards dispute over resource and a shift away from community care.

This, alongside hospital discharge pressures, is driving up costs and causes overspend in many areas. We also know the experience of people can be at its worst when falling between social care and health.

There are three shifts that the Secretary of State wants to achieve – analogue to digital, treatment to prevention, and hospital to community – and there many ways that ADASS is already thinking about how to help him achieve these which we have set out in Time to Act.

But now, as I near the end of my speech, I want to prepare to introduce Andy Smith President of ADCS. To do so, I want to talk about Preparation for Adulthood, a priority we share.

Preparation for adulthood

You may know that I am a Mum of a sixteen year old who is transitioning from special school to mainstream college.

As a Mum, I have fought hard for his inclusion, for his opportunity to achieve his goals, and for his independence.

At times, it has been tough navigating the system we have. It particularly seems challenging to negotiate steps from one stage to another.

As a leader, I am passionate about the lives of people we support and I am passionate about preparing for adulthood. We know we don’t achieve the outcomes we would like for young people often enough.

We have been waiting a long time for reform of our core People services in Local Government – Adult Social Care, Children’s social care, and SEND. The longer we wait, the more chance of young people falling in the gaps.

Parents tell us that often our usual service responses are not linked up and don’t help manage the important life stage from adolescence to adulthood in a way that is straight forward. Younger adults often tell us that their experiences were bumpy and frightening.

Enabling our young people with additional needs to leave school, gain work, secure housing, and get a great start to their adult life seems an obvious shared goal.

So this year we have had a focus on what we can do as we wait for reform, to achieve that goal.

Our main sponsor, Impower, facilitated a roundtable discussion about this topic and we launch the report this week.

Meanwhile, our Principle Social Workers are considering practice.

Think Local Act Personal are gathering the stories of people with lived experience.

The intention is to support our councils and colleagues to make changes, to grow work across children’s and adults, and to strengthen systems. Importantly, to set this out to our Government so we are clear with how they can use their levers to improve young lives.

Reasons for hope

So preparation for adulthood, and how we can improve it, gives me hope. Hope for something better, a more hopeful future that we can create by child and adult social care practitioners working together.

But I also have hope about the future of adult social care more broadly.

We are a passionate, committed, and determined group of people trying to make things work, and to work in better ways. I have a real sense of optimism that our new Government sees this and will start to tackle the systemic national issues that need reform.

While the budget may not have provided an answer to the funding question, the mood music is loud. We have talk about a royal commission, a national care service, about seating social care at the table next to health as part of the NHS 10-year plan. 

And to those of us in this room working in this space, I have hope that together, we can continue to fight for the visibility, rights and respect of the people that social care supports. 

Now I’d like to welcome on stage my fellow President from ADCS, Andy Smith.

ENDS