Fiona White

Liberal Democrat Councillor for Guildford West Learn more

Surrey Adult Care services savings at risk

by fionawhite on 23 June, 2013

Adult Social Care is the biggest budget for all of Surrey County Council’s services.  This is because we have a lot of older people in the county and have one of the highest numbers of people with learning disabilities in the country.  The department’s budget has been hit hard over the last few years because of cuts in government funding.   This year we have to find another £45.882M.  Yes, those figures are right.

The finance officers report to the ASC Committee on the financial situation and the report to Thursday’s meeting shows that there are question marks over how the majority of the savings can be made.  They use a red, amber, green system to show how likely it is that the savings can be made.  On that basis, only £3M were green (certain) savings, £14,173 were amber (not sure) and a whopping £28,709M were red (no certainty).

One of the things they are relying on for the rest is what they are calling “Social Capital”.  That means that the amount the council pays in care packages can be reduced because communities will play a bigger role in preventing social care needs or will help to meet the needs.   This seems to assume that there are people in the community who have the time and resources to give the support needed but these days so many families rely on both adults working just to pay for their living costs which doesn’t leave a lot to spare.  The worst thing would be to try to make the savings based on something which isn’t there and leave people without the support they need to stay in their own home.  If that doesn’t work, they would have to go into residential care which is very much more expensive.

I have asked for more information to be given to the committee, especially to identify how much of the “social capital” exists already and what can be done to encourage people to get involved more.  If the support in the communities is not there, there will be an even bigger hole in the budget.

Surrey already sets a very high level of need before care packages can be agreed by the council.  There are a lot of people who are considered to have low or medium needs who can’t get help.  For many of them if help was given at the right time higher care costs could be avoided.  Prevention is better than cure (as my old granny used to say).

On a more positive note, we had some very brief presentations from voluntary organisations in Surrey who do so much to give help and advice to Surrey people.  While they were speaking I kept thinking to myself “How on earth would we look after all these people without them”.  Of course, the voluntary organisations are the ones who provide a lot of help and support to the people with low and medium needs which Surrey does not provide at the moment and keep them out of needing a higher level of care.  A lot of those voluntary organisations are struggling because of funding cuts from Surrey which is a false economy.  All it does is push the problem off to a later date.

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