Optimism for a time to act from a survey of risk and gloom
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Our President, Melanie Williams, shares her thoughts following the launch of this year’s annual survey of Directors of Adult Social Services.
Our new government announced an ambitious reform agenda in the King’s Speech last week, and there certainly is a sense of a new approach and change. Speaking with new MPs, many of whom have local government backgrounds, there is an energy to consider how we reform adult social care.
Financial outlook
The findings in our latest survey of Directors of Adult Social Services this year are quite stark. We know that many of our Director of Adult Social Services (DASS) colleagues are struggling with budgets in their councils and facing overspends that seem insurmountable. The survey shows adult social care budgets were overspent at the highest levels for at least a decade at £586mn. Many of us are using grant, council reserves and temporary money to prop us up and we are not clear what the Autumn settlement will bring for us.
Given our social care workforce was one of our key election asks, it was brilliant to see in the King’s Speech supporting papers that pay for care workers will have a national approach. This is welcome, with Directors saying in the survey that this is a priority in their local areas, alongside wellbeing for staff, but it must be funded. Our survey also highlights the ongoing instability in the care market. This instability will lead to collapse if local government cannot increase fees we can pay to our partner providers to fund the cost of any care worker pay deal.
Our workforce
We launched the Adult Social Care Workforce Strategy last week with our key partners. This has been an incredible collaboration of the sector led by Skills for Care. For our new government this provides a blueprint for how pay, recognition, development and support can be delivered.
The workforce strategy reflects many of the concerns we’ve raised through our survey, including the need to address delegation of healthcare tasks to care workers and the shifting interface between health and care. Some of this is driven by a formal delegation of healthcare and some of it is due to the wavy line between health and social care drifting. Frontline adult social care staff are increasingly undertaking tasks that were previously delivered by NHS staff on an unfunded basis, with 84% of Directors indicating that this is the case. The new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting, wasted no time in setting out that the NHS needed change and I welcome his focus on community care. Adult social care needs to be front and centre of this work as we consider how to work collaboratively and in integrated teams with our health partners, but in a way that is person-centred, transparent, and supports our staff to feel that they are equipped to care.
My hope is that we can now have a new narrative for adult social care and that our role in shaping good lives for individuals has benefit for a civil and just society, that is central to inclusive growth in our communities. A rethink of housing, community support, employment support, and integrity in public life brings about a platform for ADASS to model how to work with working age disabled people, older people, carers and those working in social care. The report, Time to Act, which draws together a wide consensus from across the sector about how to transform social care, provides our guiderails for this conversation.
This year’s survey was not pleasant reading and warned of risk, gloom and challenge. The new government, with a mandate for reform, gives me a sense of hope.
Related pages and articles
ADASS responds to Skills for Care’s ‘Workforce Strategy for Adult Social Care in England’
Valuing our social care workforce – on the brink of action?
Metrics of misery..and a message of hope?
