By Cllr David Hare
Many people know that the adult Social Care reforms trumpet the fact that none of us will have to pay for Social Care once we have paid £86,000. But what does that mean for you, and what does it mean for the Council accounts?
The first thing to say is the amount you have paid for care is the only criteria for costs.
So, if you pay £1,000 a week for a bed in a care home and £650 of that is for the care then £350 is ‘hotel costs’ that do not get counted.
The next thing is a local cost for care will be worked out, this will be the amount used to judge what you have paid towards the limit. If you are in an expensive home the amount you pay for care may well be above the amount you are counted as paying.
Many complaints to Adult Services now are to do with payments, this will multiply that problem, even if we can recruit the staff to work out a local cost of care and then what counts for each individual.
The primary aim of the charging reforms is to redistribute the financial responsibility for paying for an individual’s care between the individual and the local authority. At its simplest, the cost to the individual will reduce, and the cost to the local authority will increase.
To achieve this aim, there are four key components:
- a cap on the amount any individual can spend on their personal care over a lifetime;
- a more generous system of means testing; a ‘fair’ cost of care will be established to support providers;
- enactment of section 18(3) of the Care Act which will mean all individuals can ask the local authority to arrange their care, so self-funders will not pay an excess.
Self-funders support people who are funded by the Council. The payment for self-funders is about 40% over what the Council pays.
This will change so that self-funders will pay less while the Council pays more, so that everyone pays the same for a set level of care. Having to pay the cost of care when people reach the limit for self-funding will mean, after about three years, that the Council has a bill for at least an extra £26.5 million per annum on the Adult Care Services budget as there are, in Wokingham, about 3,117 private funders.
There is this cost of care, but in addition we will need about 20 additional social workers to assess and review care plans, the ICT needs of the service must be newly developed as well as at least 4 extra administration workers to manage care accounts being required. The cost of care exercise must be completed by October, and authorities must write a plan to say how they will meet the extra costs of this service.
Yes, if you are going into care from the start of this system (and counting the cost of care doesn’t start until October 2023), your assets will be damaged but not obliterated. But it will mean a huge extra bill, with funding not seeming to be available from anywhere, for the Council to meet.
Being a small unitary and very badly funded borough, Wokingham has not got the reserves to meet this increased cost. It also has one of the largest proportion of self funders in the land, if nothing is done and this becomes a statutory cost it will mean that some of the services we provide that are not essential statutory provision, however positive they are for the population, will need to be cut.
I had some plans to develop some area of the Adult Care field that I felt needed to be extended, but I understand my director is very wary of starting new developments when this elephant seems to be charging down the road.
I must agree that the role of the dice to put someone in a home should not see the end of their assets but expecting the Local Authority, who have consistently been underfunded, to find this type of extra cost is not something we can understand or, in any way afford.
Cllr David Hare is the executive member for Health, Wellbeing and Adult Services
