Department of Health and Social Care budget – Best ways to use it

What is the adult social care budget?

Recent government allocations significantly impact the adult social care budget for 2024. In the Autumn Statement 2023, the government announced up to £2.8 billion in 2023/24 and £4.7 billion in 2024/25 to support adult social care and facilitate hospital discharges to reduce delays. This included £1.7 billion specifically from increased council tax revenues and £3.1 billion repurposed from delayed reforms.

Despite these allocations, there are ongoing concerns about whether this funding will adequately address the sector’s needs especially given rising costs, increased demand, and staffing challenges.

Social Care Budget Updates

Recent updates to the social care budget, a mix of new grants, increases in adult social care precept, and a reallocation of funds are argued to help deliver outcomes across health and social care.

However, despite these increases, experts argue that rising costs and inflation will limit the benefits and improvements achieved from these budget boosts. Some health and social care leaders have warned without matching spending to actual costs of care, and service quality, to avoid patient outcomes suffering.

Whilst it’s agreed extra funding opportunities are needed to manage the rising concerns and challenges throughout the health and social care sector, there are mixed feelings about the sufficiency of the funds in addressing the full scope of complex issues facing the adult social care sector.

Here due to the rising demand, workforce challenges, and limited resources, extra funding boosts are vital to provide local authorities with the resources needed to better cater to the complex needs of the community.

Adult Social Care Budget Importance

As discussed adult social care budgets and funding are vital for local authorities to help them commission and deliver better coordinated and person-centred care that matters to the individual.

Below are just some of the key reasons why adult social care funding is crucial for local authorities to better support their communities:

1. Supports vulnerable populations

Adult social care provides essential services to adults with various needs, it is especially vital for more vulnerable populations including older adults, people with disabilities, and those with mental health issues.

Here adult social care funding ensures individuals receive the care and support they need whenever they need it. Being strategic with funding not only helps support individuals with their complex needs but equally it increases their independence, provides reassurance to loved ones, and reduces dependencies on primary and secondary care as well as care homes which are equally stretched. Here hospital admissions can be reduced as well as avoidable GP appointments.

By enabling more outcomes-based commissioning, demand for health and social care needs can be managed more effectively. This, in turn, reduces delays in hospital discharges, which are often caused by a lack of available social care support, so individuals can return home to recover quickly and safely.

Outcomes-based commissioning can also be used to facilitate community assets including social prescribing and technology enabled care by focusing on specific needs at individual, provider, and place-based levels personal health can be enhanced, service delivery can improve, and community mental health can be promoted to create a more holistic and integrated approach to health and social care.

2. Improving quality of life

Adult social care budgets are fundamental for improving the quality of life for individuals who require assistance with daily activities.

Having the support needed when individuals require it not only benefits their physical health but their mental health too. Here they can feel confident that they will be encouraged to complete tasks, if physically able to do so, to maintain their independence but with the reassurance extra support and guidance can be provided when needed.

This, in turn, helps to reduce avoidable health inequalities by ensuring all individuals have access to the same level of support so everyone gets treated the same.

3. Economic efficiency

One of the main challenges across the health and social care sector is being economically efficient in the long run. Having sufficient funding, and using it efficiently, helps prevent hospital admission, and offers timely discharges to save significant costs for the healthcare system.

Here well-funded health and social care systems help to better support workforces by offering stable employment whilst avoiding both care worker stress and burnout.

4. Better address social inequalities

Efficient adult social care funding better addresses the social inequalities and inequities found across communities. Through better funding options the accessibility of care improves to provide support to those who might otherwise be unable to afford or access the care and support they need.

During times of economic hardship, like the cost-of-living crisis, this has been even more essential as more individuals struggle financially and are more limited to paid care options and alternatives.

5. Workforce Stability

As you are probably aware, and arguably, one of the most important reasons for adult social care budgets is to enable social care sectors to employ a larger and more sustainable workforce.

Funding is important therefore to maintain and attract a skilled workforce, ensure fair wages, and reduce turnover rates, which in turn improve the quality and continuity of care delivered.

Types of Budget Expenditure

With many complex needs, local authorities must use their budgets and funding to cater to every individual need at the highest quality. Funding therefore can be spread and used across several areas, it’s up to your local authority to determine priorities in terms of deciding your spending. Some types of budget expenditure is shown below.

1. Residential and Nursing Care

As discussed with needs becoming more complex the dependency on care homes has risen dramatically. In fact, in 2022 over 408,000 people were living in care homes across the UK including 4% of the population being aged 65 and over, rising to 15% for those aged 85 and over.

For those eligible to receive local authority-funded care in both residential care homes and nursing homes, the expenditure is essential to ensure they have access to the care they need and deserve. In 2021/22 it was estimated the average cost of a local authority-funded care home places for someone aged over 65 was £767 a week. Now it is anticipated that is figure has continued to rise.

2. Home and Domiciliary Care

Another key area is home or domiciliary care. As discussed due to the increased dependency on care homes, providing more advanced and person-centred home care is vital to enable individuals to continue living independently.

In 2021/22 it has been estimated that local authorities, on average paid £18.88 an hour to commission externally provided home care services.

3. Community-based services

Funding reablement and community-based services is another way adult social care budgets are used across local authorities to provide better short-term support enabling individuals to be discharged from the hospital sooner and return home to continue their recovery.

This is a useful type of expenditure as in turn, it helps reduce pressure on health professionals in hospitals by reducing hospital discharge delays.

Using adult social care budgets to invest in more innovative technology is another great way to increase independence whilst equally including individuals within their care plans to concentrate on what matters to them and their loved ones.

Here the commissioning of telecare, technology enabled care, and assistive technologies all help individuals live safely at home, again enabling quicker discharge processes it also enables health and social care professionals access to actionable insights before something more critical happens to prevent future care needs and hospital admissions.

4. Direct payments and personal budgets

Both direct payments and personal budgets are more ways adult social care budgets get spent across local authorities.

Whether funds are given directly to individuals to manage their needs or an additional person is hired to manage and purchase the services needed. Local authorities will spend significant amounts on ensuring services needed are purchased. In the King’s Fund's latest social care expenditure report they recorded that £1.5 billion has been spent on direct payments this past year.

5. Specialist Services

To cater to more complex needs, your local authority may use more funding to commission the specialist services needed. This could include mental health services, substance abuse services, as well as offering respite care to give unpaid family carers a break from their caregiving needs.

6. Additional services

Finally, local authorities, like yours also will need to spend funding on training and development programs to improve the skills and qualifications of your social care staff.

Equally, the budget needs to also be spent on infrastructure costs to both maintain and develop care facilities including both buildings and facilities. Funds are also spent on operational costs including day-to-day expenses such as transportation and staff salaries.

All these examples demonstrate the different ways your local authority can utilise their adult social care budget effectively for the best outcomes. Whilst every local authority will use the budget differently, all should cater to the needs of the to deliver better personalised and coordinated care that matters to the individual.

Adult Social Care Budget Challenges

Local authorities can experience several challenges when managing the adult social care budget, these all stem from the increasing demand, financial constraints, and systemic issues.

1. Increasing Demand

As the number of older adults requiring care is rising, many are now living with more than one complex condition, adding significant pressure on social care services to reach this newly increasing demand. It is estimated that the number of people aged 85 or over in the UK will nearly double in the next 25 years. More strategic plans must be put in place to not only reach the demand now but in the future so the quality of care commissioned and delivered does not decrease.

2. Financial Constraints

Despite there being increases in funding pots, it is thought that due to the increasing demand, these funding boosts do not go far enough. Many local authorities are still struggling to meet the growing demand for social care services and the rising costs due to inflation often causing local authorities to overspend.

Exacerbated by the cost-of-living crisis, increasing financial pressures on both service users and providers make it even harder for many local authorities to manage budgets.

3. Workforce Issues

Over the past few years, the social care sector has been facing significant recruitment and retention challenges. Low wages, high stress, and being overworked have left many social care workers being signed off due to work-related stress and burnout or leaving the profession altogether. This, in turn, increases the workload for the existing workforce creating a vicious cycle for all social care workers whilst they still try to reach the ever-increasing demand.

4. Systemic Issues

It is becoming key for local authorities to be collaborative with health and social care services by integrating services through digital solutions. However, it is not always that simple. Challenges in integrating services cause inefficiencies and fragmented care, and complex regulations and administrative processes can cause delays to service deliveries, increasing further cost implications.

5. Quality and Accessibility of Care

Undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges is maintaining the service quality and access to all social care services provided in the community.

There is considerable variation in the quality of social care services across different regions. This, in turn, causes inequalities in care provision leaving many individuals facing difficulties in accessing the care they need whether it's due to geographic disparities, long waiting lists, or eligibility criteria excluding some to receive support.

Best Ways to Use the Adult Social Care Budget

For local authorities to address the combination of the challenges discussed, local authorities need to find new and innovative ways to best utilise the budget without overspending or putting anyone at risk.

Implementing both strategic and outcomes-based commissioning enables your local authority to better plan and commission the care and support needed now and in the future.

1. Personalised care plans and improved scheduling

One way adult social care budgets can be spent on digital solutions to overcome the challenge of the increasing demand is through digitialising care plans. Here care management software supports the delivery of care to improve social care activity recording and scheduling across the community.

Derbyshire Country Council for example invested in our Access CM solution to streamline their services so support workers could access all the information they needed about their clients for each day on the go through our mobile app. Here Derbyshire could get real-time updates making it easier to adjust care plans accordingly as needs change.

2. Improved quality and risk management

Once the services needed have been planned and commissioned, it is also vital that local authorities can manage these services and be notified of any risks to ensure the continuity of care. Having the right data to inform this kind of decision-making is vital all year but especially in times of crisis.

Worcestershire County Council found this out first-hand when they adopted our Access PAMMS Social Care Landscape digital tool. Here they had access to a powerful predictive tool to analyse social care requirements. By going live in 2020 just as the pandemic hit they experienced extreme benefits in managing data when both shutting down and relaunching landscape projects.

Now four years later they can use our landscape tool daily to support their local budgeting and planning when analysing performance and risks to deliver better outcomes-focused care.

3. Enhanced future planning

As discussed above, one way to better utilise adult social care funding is improving your care planning for both now and in the future to manage future demand more effectively.

Middlesbrough Council invested in our Access Demand Model to predict future trends in adult social care to support them in more accurate planning. This, in turn, helped them to predict social care trends with 99% accuracy and better manage their spending to strategically commission the services they need as needs change.

These accurate forecasts also allowed for seasonality too, to identify periods of seasonal pressures as well as decreased activity to effectively manage their resource allocation too so both accessibility to services and their outcomes could improve significantly.

4. Enhanced compliance

Whilst effective care planning is vital, it can only happen when local authorities work with fully compliant providers. Otherwise, your local authority puts individuals at risk of receiving poor quality care or insufficient care.

To overcome this digitally transforming your compliance processes helps ensure your local authority only ever works with fully compliant providers by streamlining the procurement process, increasing competition, saving staff time, and most importantly securing care providers at a fraction of the time and price.

Midlands and Lancashire Community Support Unit and Staffordshire County Council have been able to experience this firsthand by collaborating and investing in Access Adam Care Commissioning. Since they implemented our commissioning software they have been able to save time on administrative tasks by 20% and within one year Staffordshire Council and MLCSU went from owing £9.2 million in debt at the end of 2019/2020 to nothing by the end of the 2020/2021 financial year.

This improved transparency has also meant better delivery of reporting and analytics of their joint-care funded packages to help identify where they can improve the quality of care further.

5. Facilitates more community assets

Adult social care budgets can be used effectively to facilitate better strategic and outcomes-based commissioning across both social care services and community assets concentrating on individual, provider, and place-based outcomes to create a more holistic and integrated approach.

The table below demonstrates how using adult social care budgets for community assets including social prescribing and technology enabled care helps improve service deliveries as well as promote community health and wellbeing.

Understanding Budgets in Health and Social Care – How can Access Local Government help?

This article has summarised adult social care budgets are critical for local authorities to deliver the necessary services for every individual throughout the community. However, challenges including restricted budgets and rising demands make it harder to manage the services required.

Whilst acknowledging funding boosts that have been introduced, this article has highlighted the concerns health and social care experts have about whether these funding streams go far enough to overcome the challenges across the health and social care market.

This article has demonstrated therefore the importance of strategic commissioning and the power digital tools can have in streamlining planning and commissioning processes to better support all the care needs of the community.

Whether your local authority invests in better case management systems, predictive tools,  systems to improve compliance or community-based assets, our local government software enables your local authority to deliver better outcomes-based commissioning and strategic commissioning that is essential to maximise budgets and improve outcomes to deliver better coordinated and person-centred care.

For more information on the options you have to improve social care services across your local authority contact us today.

Let’s get started on digitally transforming social care in your local area to manage budgets effectively, prevent overspending, and most importantly improve quality of life.