Surgery performed with plasters

Desperate ministers considering hiking council tax in order to ease the social care crisis have been told their plan will not work by Tory party colleagues, because of “out of control” funding problems.

The care crisis – exacerbated by 40 per cent cuts to local authority budgets over six years – cannot be resolved by increasing council tax because the scale of the cash shortfall is too big, warned Conservative chair of the Local Government Association’s community wellbeing board, Izzi Seccombe.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Seccombe said the government was looking into increasing the 2 per cent council tax levy for social care made available to local authorities last year.

She said the previous levy only raised ÂŁ380m of the ÂŁ600m needed to cover costs from the introduction of the new minimum wage and that relying on council tax increases would mean richer areas would be better serviced than poorer ones.

Seccombe also called for an immediate cash injection from the government.

She said, “We need an injection now of £1.3bn because there is a shortfall by the end of 2020 of £2.6bn.”

Former Tory health secretary Stephen Dorrell said that while he welcomed councils being allowed to raise council tax to pay for social care, the proportions of the crisis meant that it would not be enough.

‘Fundamental rethink’

Instead Dorrell, who is now chair of NHS Confederation, called for a “fundamental” rethink of health and social care funding.

He said, “What we are talking about is a cash shortage that is threatening the stability not just of local government but of the National Health Service. Unless we address this seriously, we will simply see a failure of service across the range of local public services and people will suffer as a consequence.”

Government attempts to stem the loss of care services, 40 per cent of which are estimated to be no longer viable in the medium term because of funding cuts and cost increases, have ended in failure.

On Sunday the Observer newspaper revealed that in England 58 per cent of targets in 2015/16 for improving social care through the  £4bn Better Care Fund, which comes from the NHS budget and aims to reduce hospital bed-blocking, were missed.

Responses, from 151 local authorities that the newspaper sent freedom of information requests to, also showed that councils met just a quarter of their targets for reducing emergency hospital admissions of social care recipients.

Fair funding call

Unite’s national officer for local authorities, Fiona Farmer, eviscerated the government’s social care record and said significant investment and fair funding for councils was the only way to reverse the crisis.

“So far the government’s response to a social care crisis of its own making has to been to shift money around and shunt responsibility onto desperately overstretched local authorities. The Better Care Fund, which diverts cash out of the NHS budget, has been shown to be a dismal failure. The same goes for the increase in council tax, which simply cannot bridge the massive shortfall in funding,” Farmer said.

“Hiking council tax bills further is just more of the same: an attempt by the Tories to be seen to be doing something by passing the buck to councils. Local authorities have been cut to the bone and it is evident that the social care system as it stands cannot function much longer. Increasing council tax is a woefully inadequate solution to those issues.”

Farmer added, “Britain needs real leadership on this because it is abundantly clear the way social care is funded and delivered needs radically overhauling. Instead we’ve got bungling and evasive Tory ministers who seem to think surgery can be performed with sticking plasters.”