Children are going to bear the brunt of the next wave of cuts to local council services according to this recent BBC article, as councils seek to cut an additional £3 billion in savings from their budgets in the coming financial year.
And by 2026-2027 they will still face a £5-6 billion shortfall.
The consequences of this are dire, with nearly one in ten UK councils expecting to go bust in the next year according to this Guardian Article... it's tough out there for local councils.
Local councils provide a huge range of services - waste collection, local culture and arts (libraries being the most obvious front facing of these), leisure (leisure centres), policing, and then the biggies.... adult social care and child care services.
The figures below are a few years old and based on national averages but you can clearly see that social care takes up the lions share of the budget! More than half, and that is INCREASING as people get older.
As I understand it most of this cost is poor people who can't afford their own care who end up living in care homes, we are talking here about £10s of thousands a year per individual.
If you can afford it you pay for your own care with your house, until you've spent everything but yr last £26K, but if you spend up to that then the council picks up the rest of the tab.
Not a local problem!
There are going to be differences in demand for adult care from county to county, probably higher in more deprived areas where people have less capacity to pay for their own care, and I imagine these councils are going to be MORE pressured.
The last decade has seen huge cuts to EVERYTHING ELSE OTHER THAN SOCIAL CARE AND CHILDCARE - meaning all the easy cuts have been made.
Councils have stopped collecting bins every week and closed libraries but they haven't started cutting adult social care in any significant way.
It's a travesty, I think we need more of a national adult social care approach than this being subsumed under local authority budgets, as it stands I think some councils are going to be having much more of a burden than others.
Where there's more of an adult social care burden, I imagine this is where we are seeing more cuts to other areas.
Adult social care really has been the elephant in the room for too long, shoved under the underfunded local authority carpet, I hope the government address this in the next budget.