Care funding gap in capital up to £907m?

The adult social care funding gap in the capital will widen to £907m within five years, according to a report by London Councils. However, by working more closely with the NHS, improving procurement and developing new ways to provide social care for older and disabled people, savings of between £240m and £735m could be made to plug the hole. The representative body for London’s 33 local authorities highlights in A Case for Sustainable Funding for Adult Social Care how councils will be forced to spend a higher proportion of their budgets on adult social care. Assuming that the next Comprehensive Spending Review in 2014 brings a 5% cut in local authority budgets, London Councils report predicts that social care and waste collection could account for more than 60% of London boroughs’ budgets by 2020. They currently spend around one third (£2.8bn) of their budgets on adult social care. The analysis does not allow for the implementation of the recommendations of the Dilnot Commission and calculates the funding shortfall would increase to around £1.3bn if they were introduced. London Councils’ executive member for adult services, Cllr Ravi Govindia said: We are calling on the government to decide quickly how to implement the Dilnot recommendations; remove some of the red tape which would make providing adult social care services more efficient and recognise that help will be needed to fill the funding gap as our population ages and needs more care.’